http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/p...FuJjZK7NI2No3Yw

An interesting article about recent findings of how our subconcious works to affect our concious actions.

Very interesting, thanks.

The article describes how handling cold coffee makes people think that other people are emotionally cold and in the same breathe says


So, according to this author, part of the grand purpose of my subconscious is to infer other people's emotional states and sociability based on whether I've handled hot or cold coffee. Brilliant!

Gives support to intelligent conversation, this posting of internet academia.

Yah, I've wondered about this research for some time. What I don't understand is the mechanism. Why would our brains work that way?

I'd really like to try to replicate one of these experiments some day. Keep a watch out on my site, and perhaps I'll have one in a few months: coglanglab_DOT_org.

Has anybody here participated in one of these experiments or run one themselves?

Interesting site. I have participated in various psych and cognitive experiments, mainly examining various aspects of attention, but not in the particular type of experiment mentioned above.

The experiment cited by Rhymer is what's known as Physiological Psychology which is closely related to Neuroscience. In essence it deals with how physiological stimuli affects the brain and cognition. If you are thinking about conducting experiments of this type, I would suggest looking into Behavioural Neuroscience and Physiological Psychology. This should give you a good place to start researching for such experiments.

Here are some posts I wrote recently on this topic you might find interesting:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/do-you-see-...-see-14026.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/results-exp...-see-14060.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/my-favorite...sion-14077.html
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/visual-illu...dium-14227.html