Sam Talks About...

First, if you haven't read my other post about why people are religious,  then a) what are you playing at?!? and b) go check it out now and then come back to this. Now atheism is becoming bigger and bigger, however there are no atheist dominated communities, they are spread out throughout the world, often popping up with little to no encouragement. Now this may have something to do with the internet, and that these communities exist in cyberspace rather than actual space. But atheism has been around for a long long time. Many early Greek philosophers could be described as atheists .e.g Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Democritus and even Socrates to an extent. There has probably been some form of atheism ever since there has been religion, but why?  In the previous post, I mentioned how religiosity is intuitive and that it is effectively our default way of thinking. So therefore atheist thinking is inherently counter-intuitive to us. If you have ever gone from being religious to athe...

With everything in life, it's important to eat healthily. The same applies to revision, so here I have a few tips about what to eat in order to get the best results from your revision. Please check out my post about  how to revise properly  aswell for some more tips We all know it's a pain, but you can make it slightly more bearable! So one of the first things I want to cover here are energy drinks, now these are good  if say you've got a deadline for a report or something and you need to pull an all nighter, but when it comes to long term revision, you want to try and stick to a normal sleep cycle, as this helps to consolidate memories and prevents you from being groggy and slow for the next few days (for more see the previous post about sleep). So you shouldn't really be revising really late at night. Also a lot of people tend to have energy drink crashes when they finally stop drinking energy drinks, if you got an energy drink crash in the middle of an exa...

Why is it that some people can remember things really easily and others can't? well it could be that they have a better memory, but that doesn't mean that you can't improve your own memory when it comes to revising. Some people seem to just read over their notes and that's it, done, I've remembered it. Others can read over their notes 6 or 7 times and still not remember it a couple of days later. This is not because they have a bad memory, they're just revising the wrong way for them. Memory is connected to your senses, that''s why you might be reminded of a certain event when you smell or hear or see something. When revising you can take advantage of this by using multiple senses when learning something, making the memory a lot stronger So here is the ideal way of revising. Use as many parts of your brain as possible when revising. The most concise way of doing this is by reading a line of your notes once or twice, close your eyes and imagine it...

Religion is an important part of many millions of people's lives. For me, I agree with some of the teachings many religions praise (giving back to the community etc) but I am by no means religious. As a part of studying neuroscience I have begun to think about human nature more and more, this has led me to asking a very difficult question; Why are people religious?  This question is not easy to answer, but I hope to lay out a few ideas that might shed some light on why many people become and stay religious.  One of the main reasons that people are religious- aside from inherited religiosity (which is fairly obvious), is that it comes very easily to many people. It is intuitive to many people, that there is a higher being (often in a human-like shape) that is overseeing the world. This is an not a surprise when you think about it, as we humans are very social beings. We are the most social species on the planet, and we have a number of powerful mental tools that allow us to ...

Now we've all been in that situation where you have the choice between doing something fun but bad in the long run and doing something boring but will do you good in the future. As a student I am acutely aware of this problem- I should probably be doing something more relevant to my work right now, but oh well. That "oh well" phenomenon is what I'm going to try and explain here. Why do we forsake long term gains for short term bursts of reward? Well it turns out that there is a very logical explanation, and if you know how this system works, you can effectively trick yourself into being more forward thinking and making decisions that will help you in the long term. There are 2 competing systems at work here. The first is the more primitive instant gratification/ reward system that uses primarily the neurotransmitter (brain chemical) dopamine and is based more centrally in the brain- which is also involved in schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease (motor functio...