Visual Illusions, Tricks of the Mind, and Great Writing

Editor’s Note: This article reviews posts from our free blogging service which we closed in February 2008. The indvidual article links have therefore been removed.

If you’re looking for a free and easy-to-use blogging platform, our new sister site, BlogsInMind.com, provides it all — and some exciting new blogs have appeared there in the last few days. Here’s a selection…

At ‘talking therapies’, posts on ‘Visual illusions’ and ‘Tricks of the Mind’ offer some pointers to resources on illusions and cognitive distortions, including this example:

Give yourself five seconds to come up with a rough answer to the following multiplication in your head. You won’t have enough time to work out a proper answer, so hazard a guess:

2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8

Please note your answer, and have a few other people try it too. Note their answers as well. Next, find some more people of the same intellectual level and have them offer an answer to the following, with the same restriction of five seconds:

8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2

As Piatelli-Palmarini suggests, the second set of results will be significantly greater than the first. Looking at both, we know that the answers must be the same, but somehow the second sequence yields higher estimates.

Want to know the explanation? You’ll just have to read the rest of the post!

Another blogger, at ‘Hopeless, Yet Wishful’, shares some personal reflections in a post called ‘Tough and often harsh beginnings’. This person is getting set to embark on a counselling course, and their honesty and willingness to examine themselves strikes me as just the sort of thing that will play a big role in the transition to working as a counsellor.

The blog ‘Between the Darkness and the Light’ also shares some very personal experiences, this time of a woman who describes the blog as being about “my stuggle to live my whole life supporting those who suffer from mental illness”. There is some very poignant writing here, especially in posts like ‘Dreams, Nightmares, Reality’, and ‘The Long Dark’. She really has something to say, and something to share.

This is just a selection of the latest activity over at the new site, so if you’d like to read more, I’d encourage you to drop by and see what’s been happening. And if you’d like to join these bloggers with a little corner of the web to call your own, it’s easy to get started.

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