8. “Multiple personalities” is just for movies now

Even when we’re considering how the hormone makes us feel socially, it’s not all love and cuddles. In some experiments, it causes people to be more suspicious of those we see as different from us. It may also make us pay more attention to both positive and negative social cues, increasin...

The bright colors we see on fMRI scans are added afterward, as a way of color-coding what’s going on in different areas of the brain. And they refer to the amount of blood that is flowing throug...

But that doesn’t mean their brains were altered. After returning home, nearly all renounced the beliefs they had supposedly been brainwashed into believing. And even though the term “brainwashing” has since been used to describe cu...

It turns out that people can be persuaded, and they can be pressured or tortured into saying things they don’t believe. You don’t need a sinister psychological phenomenon to explain that.

There is no set of physical or even behavioral characteristics that would let you say whether somebody is in a “hypnotic trance” versus just being interested in playing along with the person they’re talking to.

I’m sorry (or perhaps pleased?) to report that brainwashing is not, in fact, a thing. The term was used to describe American soldiers in the Korean war who appeared to side with thei...

Antidepressants are real, and they are often useful in the treatment of depression. But as the authors of the psychological terms review point out, the drugs we call “antidepressants” are at least as good at treating other things besides depression.

These classes of drugs, like tr...

Hypnosis is real, in the sense that one person can make another person (or themselves) more open to suggestion. But that doesn’t mean that the person being hypnotized is in a “trance state” that is different than normal consciousness. Being hypnotized

Certain functions of the brain have been described as hard-wired, meaning that they are permanent features of how our brains work. But this isn’t true unless you’re talking about very basic functions, like the circuits that keep us breathing. Just about everything our brains can do is

Psychology-related words and phrases tend to creep into our everyday vocabularies. Unfortunately, many of them have been twisted in our minds, and we now use them to refer to the wrong thing—or, in some cases, science has moved on and we’re talking about something woefully outdated. Here are some...

People often refer to skills as having a learning curve. The idea is that you learn more about a subject as you spend more time working on it, and that the experience can be described in terms of a graph with time along the bottom, and y...

Lie detectors have high false positive rates (when you’re nervous but you’re not lying) but they also have high false negative rates. You can easily game the system by, say, biting your tongue when y...

But we misuse the term when we describe a difficult subject as having a “steep learning curve.” If the line on the graph immediately shoots up, we might imagine ourselves climbing a mountain to reach proficiency. But a steep upslope means that we are gaining a lot of proficiency in a short amount...

Studies on brain function are often described by saying that an area of the brain “lights up” when doing a task or experiencing some particular situation. But that’s a description based on how brain scans look when they’re published, not what actually happens in the brain.

The description that certain abilities or personality traits are “hard-wired” is borrowed from the computer world. Hardware refers to circuit boards and such, and the way that they were manufactured is how they will stay; and we use the term software to describe programs that run on that hardware...

“Lie detectors” do no such thing. They cannot tell you whether a person is lying, only whether they are nervous. And if you think that anyone might be nervous while hooked up to a machine and peppered with personal questions, well, then you get why so-called lie detectors are useless.

Oxytocin has often been described as a “love molecule” because it’s been associated with social bonding. When you look at your adorable child or puppy, oxytocin is probably sending signals in your brain and body to coordinate that “awwww” reaction.

But it does a lot of other things, beside...

Now that you know brainwashing isn’t real, I have another shocker for you—truth serums aren’t, either. Drugs like sodium pentothal have been used in attempts to make people tell the truth under interrogation or other contexts. (“Sybil” of multiple personality fame did her therapy session...