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A Life Worth Living: Animal Therapy as a Biological Antidote to the Plagues of Nursing Home Living
According to the Eden Alternative model, the primary suffering in nursing homes isn’t physical disease, but a state of biological and social deprivation. This article discusses how animal therapy may help combat boredom, loneliness, and helplessness in these facilities.
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The Architecture of Survival: How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Social Memory
When a child is raised in a high-stress environment, a biological process called “adaptive calibration” may occur, which causes the child’s social memory to prioritize survival-related information. This specialization acts as a trade off whereby the brain sacrifices the ability to perceive subtle social cues, like boredom or humor, in exchange for the rapid detection…
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When Healthy Eating Becomes Harmful: Understanding Orthorexia in a Health-Obsessed World
What happens when “eating healthy” goes too far? This blog post discusses Orthorexia Nervosa as an emerging pattern where the pursuit of clean eating can become obsessive and harmful. Research suggests it’s tied to factors like perfectionism, body image concerns, and even social media habits—especially platforms like Instagram. As the line between wellness and obsession…
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Why Your Brain Refuses to Forget That One Awkward Moment
Dan Vy Tang (author) and Karina Agadzhanyan (mentor) Remember that time you got called up to the board for not paying attention and had no idea how to solve the problem? Or when you thought you were muted on Zoom but weren’t? Chances are, that moment is still burned into your memory as if it’s…
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Artificial Affection: Exploring Human-AI Relationships
As AI adoption becomes increasingly widespread, researchers have been exploring how people develop human-like attachments to AI, which has both beneficial and risky implications.
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The Places That Shape Us: Small Towns vs. Big Cities
Some of us spent our childhood building forts in the woods with our siblings and knowing the full history of everyone in our town. Others spent their early days with endless activities to choose from and the constant sound of police cars and ambulances whizzing by. These very different environments shape the world we know,…
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When Health Becomes a Moral Issue
From cigarettes to vaccines, people moralize behaviors that seem to cause harm.
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Improving our memory in educational settings
Do you have midterms or final exams coming up? We’ll go through a few different types of studying scenarios together to truly answer the question: How can you optimize your study sessions this semester? Spacing Effect: How often you study matters 1. Studying You have your exam coming up in a couple of days, and…
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Metacognitive Illusions & The Font Size Effect
Have you ever done your assigned reading and thought, “I’ll definitely remember this, it’s in HUGE, BOLD LETTERS” and then failed to recall anything on your quiz the next day? This feeling of disconnect between what we think we know and what we actually know can be explained by the human ability to monitor and…
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The Psychology of Grocery Lists: Why We Forget the Milk
How limited is our working memory capacity? While often described as fixed, research shows its boundaries depend heavily on the factors present during encoding and retrieval. Under the right conditions, we may be able to surpass what once seemed like hard limits.