Category Archives: Unique—Like Everybody Else

Can Turning a Wheel Open Your Mind? – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A research study found that performing clockwise movements actually increased a person’s preference for novelty, whilst counterclockwise movements increased the preference for familiar things. These actions even affected openness to experience, a normally stable feature of personality.

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Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression in Cancer – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A recent study of people with advanced-stage cancer found that a single dose of psilocybin led to lasting improvements in anxiety and depression. Psilocybin might enhance mood by shifting attention away from negative and towards positive emotional information.

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Psilocybin and Brain Function – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A brain scanning study found that psilocybin reduces activity in brain areas associated with self-awareness. Could this explain how mystical states of awareness occur? The implications, although intriguing, are much less clear than the authors of this study let on.

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Personality, Intelligence And “Race Realism” – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

 Researchers with an agenda based on "race realism" would have people believe that all the "socially desirable" characteristics that people can have are clustered together, and as a corollary all the unpleasant and antisocial traits cluster together too. More pointedly, the desirable traits are supposedly concentrated in certain racial groups (e.g.

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The Magical World of Parapsychology – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Parapsychologists seek to validate the existence of a spiritual dimension to reality but have repeatedly failed to establish an evidence base. Claims of paranormal phenomena appear to be incompatible with modern science.

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Precognition and the search for the soul, part 1 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

In 2011, Daryl Bem, who has the distinction of being both a respected social psychologist and an investigator into the paranormal, published a remarkable paper describing a series of experiments which he claimed provided evidence that people can be influenced by events before they have happened.

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DMT, Aliens, and Reality—Part 2 – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

In Part 1 of this article, I discussed Rick Strassman’s research on DMT. In particular I focused on the phenomenon of DMT users frequently encountering non-human entities of various kinds. These experiences have a striking similarity to alien abduction. Even more strangely, many participants came away convinced that these entities are somehow real.

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The Politics of Dreaming – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Dreaming and a person’s political orientation are connected. Liberals tend to recall their dreams more frequently than conservatives. Additionally, conservatives tend to report more mundane dream content, whereas liberals have more bizarre dreams. Differences in openness to experience may explain these findings. Liberals may be more imaginative than conservatives.

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Semen an Antidepressant? Think Again – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Recent articles in The Daily Mail and The Sun have reiterated outlandish and far-fetched claims about the health benefits for women of semen. These claim are actually based on a decade-old study that made the extraordinarily bold claim that semen has an antidepressant effect in women (Gallup, Burch, & Platek, 2002).

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Emotional Intelligence not relevant to psychopaths – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Psychopathy is a well-known personality disorder characterised by callousness, shallow emotions, and willingness to manipulate other people for selfish ends (Hare, 1999). Emotional deficits seem to be a core feature of psychopathy.

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