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Link Feast

Our editor’s pick of the week’s 10 best psychology and neuroscience links.

26 September 2015

By Christian Jarrett

Out of this world
A special feature from The Psychologist magazine on aliens and space travel, including an interview with Douglas Vakoch, clinical psychologist and Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The World’s Most Brain Twisting Puzzles – In Pictures
Your brain may appear like a 1.4kg lump of soft tofu but test yourself on what it can (and can’t) do with Clive Gifford’s mind baffling puzzles, spatial intelligence games and illusions from his new book Brain Twisters.

The Company You Keep
Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self, writes Shruti Ravindran at Aeon.

A Strange Study Involving the ‘White-Man Effect’ in Sierra Leone
Jesse Singal reports for New York magazine’s Science of Us.

“Spectacular Ability in a Sea of Disability”: The Psychology of Savantism
The latest episode of The Psychology Podcast, presented by Scott Barry Kaufman and featuring guest Darold Treffert, the scientific advisor on the film Rain Man.

Making Government Logical
Cass Sunstein writing for the New York Times welcomes the Obama administration’s instruction to federal agencies that they must incorporate behavioural science into the way they do things.

#Interfacetheory: Our Species-specific Desktop
The Psychonomic Society hosted a debate this week on the nature of perception.

Paraplegic Man Walks With Own Legs Again
American man, 26, completes 3.5-metre course thanks to computer system that reroutes signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees, reports Ian Sample for the Guardian.

How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment, by psychologist Alison Gopnik for The Atlantic.

More Doubts Over The Oxytocin And Trust Theory
From Neuroskeptic: “The claim that the hormone oxytocin promotes trust in humans has drawn a lot of attention. But today, a group of researchers reported that they’ve been unable to reproduce their own findings concerning that effect.”