Interesting Psych Stories

Looking through that PsychCentral blog article reviewing notable pysch stories that were covered throughout the year, I found a few studies that I thought were kind of interesting since they related to my day-to-day life.

One post I found interesting post talked about how recent studies and a new(ish...) book have pretty much completley refuted the idea that violent video games cause violent behavior in teens. I've been following stories about whether or not games are related to violent acts and crimes commited by people around my age, and it's nice to finally hear that playing an hour or two of Gears of War every few days isn't driving me crazy or anything.


I've always looked at stories with kids blaming Grand Theft Auto or another violent game for making them want to commit a robbery or a murder with a skeptic's eye. It seems that a significant number of people, mostly overprotective parents and irresponsible kids, have gotten into their heads the idea that saying "the game made me do it" is an excuse for delinquint behavior that, based on the cases that have had kids blame games on their actions, would concievably have occured whether the perpetrator had played Grand Theft Auto a few hours before or not.



Another article I found to be of interest was one from Scientific American about intelligence in animals. The article talks about how the idea that the human brain is the pinnacle of evolution because of our complex thoughts is wrong because other animals have demonstrated the ability to think and learn as well. I thought the part about the cephalopods (squid, octopus, that sort of thing) was particularly interesting, since it talked about how they can learn by observation and be trained with operant conditioning.


Finally, a blog post about the phenomenon of blindsight, in which someone who is legally blind can still see even though their visual cortex is damaged. I found it interesting because it showed the amazing adaptive power of the mind, which I thought was one of the cooler things we learned about this semester.