psychology.md

In the face of an attack you come across as indifferent, which minimises possible damage to you, and avoids having to give the response that the other person is hoping to provoke You never over-dramatise things and prefer to wait until the storm passes. Insults and verbal attacks are like water off a duck's back. You like to get things into perspective, quite often making excuses for the person who is being aggressive and placing yourself above any pointless conflict. Where there's trouble you assume a parental role... but do you sometimes turn a blind eye? Watch out – your behaviour might mean you avoid getting into fights, but it has its own risks: it can make you invisible and allow others to trample on you. Are you sure that you are not adopting this attitude to avoid having to stand up for yourself? You can't always be on the losing side. Say what you think when necessary... Try not to feel guilty if you have to put someone in their place. Stand your ground. This way you'll be able to find the best response to any attack that's levelled at you.

• Someone says women like to keep every light turned on because they unconsciously feel safer with lights on, even when at home.
• Companies want to help you manage burnout, not because they care about you... but because they care about your output.
• "Sperging out" is the state in which someone with asperger's express their passion to a degree no listener enjoys.
• Did you know that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not mount stupid? There is nothing like that in the paper, only subjective self-assessment of ability based on relative skill, whose result is linear: the more skilled you are, you will still self-assess as more skilled than others. It is by how much that the study exposes: the unskilled think they are more skilled than they really are, and the skilled think they are less skilled than they really are.
• The feeling of suddenly not knowing yourself is called depersonalisation. It is the most common psychological disorder after anxiety and depression.
• Assumptive selling, i.e. assuming the sale, assumes you have already made the sale (does it sound obvious?). Don't ask if the customer would like to purchase a car. Ask them what colour they would like.
• Imposter syndrome happens when you think you are an imposter, not when you are an imposter. People with this issue have low self-confidence, and high degrees of self-doubt.
• Older Japanese women get depressed when their husbands retire, firstly because the husband no longer wins bread, and secondly because the husband now stays home, before which it is rare for husband and wife to spend so much time together.
• Some men cannot respect women they have sex with, and cannot be aroused by women they respect. This is categorised as the madonna-whore complex, and these men find relationships less satisfying.
• Smokers smoke after a meal or sex because it lengthens the feeling of satisfaction from food or sex.
• Some people stay late in bed because it's the only time they have control over their own schedule, so they take the opportunity to do whatever they want (at their own expense).
• A missing stair is that guy in a group of friends who is annoying, but the group keeps him in anyway. So then other people in the group secretly warn each other about that missing stair, without making it clear to the stair guy himself.
• Compared to memorising pictures (visual learning) and spoken words (auditory learning), people remember words better when given both. While not surprising that eating both a burger and a hotdog makes you more full than when eating either one, the video did not explain whether the number of words learned is greater than the sum of those with visual and auditory learning combined.
• People eat shrimp but not worms (which are land shrimp, right?) because few people encounter seafood in an environment where they are perceived as unclean. If your first sight of a shrimp is from crawling in cow dung, then you might not eat shrimp, either.
• Having a passion at your work is overrated, says /u/Seluseho, who claims to be a psychologist. "Passion follows hard work and not the other way round. You work hard at something and give it your best and if you are lucky, passion may follow."
• A habit cannot be eradicated, only replaced by another (hopefully less addictive) habit that scratches the same itch, be it boredom, craving for stimulation, or a literal itch.
• Being oldschool is just your brain telling you, you are tired.
• Humans exhibit loss aversion: losing $100 feels worse than the satisfaction you get from winning $100. At the same time, risk aversion tells you to buy low-earning stocks (say certain 2% per year), rather than high risk stocks (say 50% chance of getting 4% per year, but also 50% of getting nothing), even if the expectation value is the same. On the other hand, since loss aversion is still in effect, you will choose a stock that definitely loses 2% per year, instead of a stock that may lose 4% per year half of the time, but also lose nothing the other half of the time. That's why you hold losing stocks, but sell well-performing stocks rather quickly. This is why you stay poor.
• People don't just think they do most of the work; they think they cause most of the problems too. We all see the most of what we do ourselves. Likewise, the harder we work, the more we ignore the luck that we also get.
• Drugs are not equally addictive to everyone. There are always outliers who don't get addicted to particular drugs. These people may advertise that fact as if they know everyone else's experiences, causing new drug users to lower their guard.
• People can dislike free stuff. Even if it's free. If it doesn't do anything for them, they have no obligation to like it. (Case in point is "wayland".)
• Hardcore smokers don't stop, no matter how high the tax rate is. The best way to tackle tobacco addiction in the society is to stop them from starting.
• The people who think happiness is something they can control, are happier. Similarly, if you believe success is driven by hard work instead of luck, you put in the hard work (and become successful).
• Once you notice something for the first time, you'll see that thing much more frequently. The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is named after the Baader–Meinhof Group, which is also called the RAF... but not that RAF... and nothing to do with them otherwise.
• "Doing things the last minute" does not work when what you're doing has no "last minute"; things with no deadline. Things with no deadline do not trigger the fight-or-flight system that warns you something needs to be done. If you have trouble with these activities (like advancing your career or keeping fit), try to either give yourself a deadline, give a little bit to do everyday, or get into the habit of doing things today.
• The seven year itch: couples tend to split up after seven years of marriage. There could be a biological reason to rear their young just as the children are able to take care of themselves, which I suppose could have been 7 years back when society didn't require education or technology.
• It is okay for men to say something hurts his feelings.
• On your spouse refusing to work, Psychology Today says: "Many studies show that children of working parents do very well. Per the literature reviews above, It's good for kids to have a role model of a parent who earns income. ... s/he deflects attention by blaming the working spouse (for not earning enough for the family) Thus invoking guilt ... Or if s/he is offered a job, s/he always finds a reason not to accept it unless it is magically perfect ... Or if s/he accepts a position, s/he doesn't work hard at it and so soon gets "laid off" or fired ... So, in the end, the spouse with Refuse-to-Work Syndrome almost always wins---No one can force him or her to work. ... If you are enmeshed with a refuse-to-work partner, you might want to show this article to him or her. It will likely yield a difficult conversation but one perhaps worth having."
• Tradwife is a traditional wife (who prefers to do stuff like housekeeping and raising kids). It is a degoratory term, but some women like it.
• There was a theory out there (search for the phrase "The purpose of cosmologies like Q, like Flat Earth, is to simplify the world") that global warming denial, flat earth, xenophobia, police brutality denial... all stem from the human desire to avoid complicated thoughts, to reduce the cognitive load on thinking by blaming all of the world's complexity on a single group of people. Hence, fascism.
• Stressful times make people clench their jaws to the point of fracturing their teeth.
• Bored people are more likely to give blood. Being bored allows you to think outside the box and do unconventional things.
• The Feynman learning technique: learn a thing, and then pretend you're teaching to a sixth grader (esp. one you expect to ask questions). If you can't explain it, you don't know that something. Learn again.
• Infinite scrolling (for any distracting site or app) impacts mental health because they have no "stopping cues", like a book you can never finish. You can combat that by scrolling down by a set amount, and then browse upwards (if the UI makes it tolerable), or by getting a new app.
• When asked "What amount of money would you need to feel totally secure?" everyone named a number that was roughly twice what they (have). In short, you will never have enough money.
• The worse people think their pain is, the worse it will actually be, so just live your life and you will be pain-free!
• "she was a very private woman" had 7,460 results. "he was a very private man" had 346,000.
• Apart from Apple (+76%) and Samsung (+19%), showing any brand of electronics on a dating profile results in a decreased likelihood of a match. Perhaps people identify with the brands they know, which are Apple and Samsung, Coke and Pepsi, whatever else.
• Feeling rich changes our behaviour. In a rigged game of Monopoly, one of the players was chosen to have twice the amount of money and dice rolls. This player becomes more aggressive and entitled to eating more pretzels.
• The people who think they can be happy, are happier. Therefore, you can be happy if you put in the work, instead of relying on luck.
• Lefties earn 10% less than righties. It is also possible that lefties are lefties because a lower-paying skill developed during childhood made them more comfortable with using the left hand, or that lefties are consistently comfortable with accepting an offer than is 10% lower than average.
• Unlike double-blind experiments, where neither the researchers nor the volunteers know what the experiment is, double-blind reviews just means both the author and reviewer are anonymous, not that neither know what the paper is about. (It might still happen if your paper is confusing enough.)
• When you assess the risk of an activity that you don't need to take part in, you compare the risk with 0 (not taking part). If you must take part, you compare the risk with the alternatives (e.g. travelling by plane, vs driving), not 0 (not travelling at all).
• Type III fun (or, in matrix form, type IV fun) is not actually a type of fun. It is miserable both during and after. Typically story-telling material though.
• You typically learn better, with much more repetitions, if you don't worry about failing.
• Transgender people can be gay. If a man liked women before becoming a transgender woman, that process also turns him (now her) gay.
• Humans prefer videos over text. Actually, they prefer anything over text. Videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text. ... (and) ... Humans are hardwired to avoid demanding cognitive strain.
• "People don't make rational decisions, they rationalize the decisions they make" - Someone... clearly unattributed, because someone on Reddit said someone else said it, and Google agrees no one else has said it before.
• "Animal spirits", or investor fight-or-flight, drives them to take action when there is great volatility... which is quite often the worst time to take action.
• A company offering to "match" employee donation for a cause is just win-win for them. Win 1: they didn't say "no, I don't want to donate for your cause." Win 2: since most employees donate next to nothing, the company also donates next to nothing.
• Dopamine plays a major role in reward-motivated behaviour (or simply motivation), not to make your feel good: "When a person is about to experience pleasure, dopamine is released in the brain, and in the parts of the brain that experience and process pleasure. Dopamine's role here is NOT that it makes you feel good. It doesn't ... (that opioids make you feel good) ... it's like a little red flag to your brain, saying "hey, pay attention, this is about to feel good, and you want to remember this, so you can do it again.""
• Women who claim to like funny men, don't like funny men.
• A scientist on an antarctic expedition is not allowed to have physical contact with anyone else because one misinterpreted signal as romance could jeopardise the entire mission.
• People code-switch (changing language, accent, or the way you talk) to fit in, sometimes unconsciously.
• Women love shopping because (as Dr Kruger speculated) they have traditionally been gatherers. Finding (shopping) and gathering (buying) every good thing (bargain) is wired more strongly in women than it is for men. In contrast, men plan their route ahead of time, make their kill (purchases), and go straight home.
• Not wanting or thinking you need to bathe is a sign of depression. Fix the issue by treating for depression.
• Watching motivational videos makes you feel good, while giving no specific action that actually helps you succeed. To succeed: do boring work. Hard work pays off. "Because consistent progress beats motivational videos every time."
• Humans don't want to feel alone. Examples include: "there are no atheists on the battlefield", and believing in God right before they die, so they can be with God in the afterlife.
• Sense of agency: humans know the difference between someone doing something intentionally (e.g. steps on your foot by accident), and unintentionally (e.g. steps on your foot on purpose). When this sense is elevated, a person (or a group of people) can think that something happened for a reason, even when it did not. See also: spirits, religions, thinking the computer is messing with you.
• "Every problem you have today, you had when you met. But you were fucking so you forgave." might explain why christian families may be seen as more stable.
• Recidivism: relapsing into criminal behaviour. People getting jailed over and over again because they're actually good at breaking the law after so many years literally meeting experts in jail.
• The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how well people think they know something. As it turns out, there is a peak in confidence about a subject right when you begin to learn it, e.g. after one chemical equation you think you are a chemist, but as you learn more and more about chemistry, you are less and less confident in yourself, except when you actually become an expert in chemistry... at which point you are confident once again. Same thing also applies to vaccines, space exploration, shape of planets, and many other conspiracies.
• "Sex" is what others see they are (based on definitions that may leave some undefined, or defined multiple times). "Gender" is what they think they are. "Sexual orientation" is what they think they'll like. "Gender orientation" currently does not exist, but if it does, and its definition is not that of "sexual orientation", then it will murky things up quite a bit.
• HUGE difference between a "housewife" and "stay-at-home mom": you can be a housewife without a child. 28% of married mothers prefer a full-time job, signalling their (72%) belief that being a mother is in itself a part/full-time job.
• Parents don't know if children are lying. Actually, no one knows when any child is lying.
• Some information has negative value. The overabundance of information, true or otherwise, can make you doubt whether the things you already know were true.
• Women don't like diamonds; they are happy with anything expensive. Women like men that provide for them, and jewellery is a symbol of wealth, and expensive gifts from their partners that can also act as insurance if their partners died or something. Some also like diamonds because they are useless: "No man (or woman) can be inherently interested in diamonds; you cannot drive them, you cannot live in them, you cannot do anything with them. Any man who would buy diamonds for a woman must be interested in making an investment in her." Men like diamonds in this case because there is no way you can sell diamonds for much money, making it a gold digger deterrent, says Psychology Today, but it also means the women cannot use diamonds as life insurance.
• Online dating (or some other event around when online dating was introduced) promoted far more interracial marriages than the "friends of friends" model. "(It) also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger"
• The shape of the placebo has a measurable effect. Blue pills are better than white pills. Capsules are better than pills. More capsules are better than fewer. Injections are better than capsules.
• Both men and women get stressed when they earn no money.
• Someone on the internet recommends working on your side projects before you go to work, because, I quote, "Our brains are the clearest and most productive during the first 3–4 hours after waking up."
• Relationships where at least one party has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) "are notorious for having multiple breakups". A person with BPD is usually "capable of loving you very intensely, but it is the very immature type of love you see in young children".
• HARKing (hypothesis after results known), something that often happens in psychology research, is doing a bunch of experiments and then making a hypothesis after knowing what correlates with what. It is a "big fucking no-no for reputable science" (/u/0xD153A53).
• Money buys you happiness: occupations that earn more lead to lower divorce rates. That or software developers are wussies.
• People with social anxiety can misread other people's facial features and overanalyse facial features that slide from positive to negative, and mistake them for worse ones. This makes your social anxiety worse. In reality, you will be a better person if you only care about the bigger, more obvious facial changes.
• "If you receive negative feedback about something you can't change, like your facial features or your family's origins, you are being bullied. People who (do this are) displaying ignorance or being cruel." You don't deserve to be treated cruelly. Find better friends.
• It is uncertain why bald men look fine but bald women really, really upset people. - Paraphrasing /u/8livesdown
• There is a whole paper on the cost of asking sensitive questions. The gist is just ask what you want, I think.
• People tend to talk about their feelings whenever they don't have much concrete to contribute, e.g. when talking about something out of their expertise.
• If someone is being a jerk to you, ask the person if they are ok or if they are having a bad day.
• Elite music players work just as many hours as others, but practice three hours instead of one, either during the morning or the afternoon instead of spreading out practice during the day, and are significantly more relaxed than average players. What it teaches you is you need persistent, deliberate practice for which your progress can be measured. You don't want the kind of false business that drains you.
• We worry about things that are hard to plan for: "We worry about things we cannot control." To not worry, try to see the probability of something happening by analysing how likely that something is to not happen, then find a way to solve that problem if it does (also known as planning).
• Men are often power tools wanting power tools.
• Teen suicides went up 1.5x between 2007 and 2017, from 6.8 to 10.6 per 100,000. No one knows why. So, it went from expecting one suicide every 10 schools, to expecting suicide every 7 schools.
• There is a strong correlation between being born underweight and having lower intelligence throughout childhood and adulthood (n=4700), and a mild risk to be linked to autism if overweight. Average weight babies are 3 to 3.5kg each. So... don't "hold it in" for as long as you can to make your baby smarter.
• "WAIS-IV (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) is considered the gold standard of IQ testing for adults." - said guy, who also said it cost anywhere from 300 to 700 dollars.
• Morality is not a meter; it is not a single measurement. Doing good for the sake of making you look good, does not change the fact that you did good (plus in one regard), but it also weakens your reputation (minus in a different, separately-measured regard).
• Women are considered better shoppers because they take the time to compare products: "Women tend to be more astute consumers than men, simply because they are willing to invest the time and energy necessary to research and compare products. At the same time, their two-sided brain approach to problem solving makes them more susceptible to emotional appeals (aka impulse shopping) than a man."
• People who kill themselves often give up their pets to an animal shelter first.
• Telling people your plans makes you less likely to do them.
• Whenever you read a piece of news, ask yourself: "Is this telling me what happened, or is it telling me what to think?" If it makes you mad - fact check it. If it makes you happy - fact check it. If it will change your vote - fact check it. If you don't understand - look it up.
• Propaganda games The states has an army propaganda game called America's Army (not very creative). Even though you know it's a game, "they make us believe that we're ... deciding our destinies for ourselves. ... By making the goal of these games to kill (Muslims, the 'default FPS enemy'), (the game is) training people by fooling them into thinking they're choosing: it's their choice to pull the trigger. They earned that headshot. They made that kill." Similar (Arab fighting Israel), (China fighting Japan) games exist.
• Adult dyslexia can exhibit itself in more ways than you think "letters": hating planning meetings, can't focus on work, gets lost easily, can't pass tests, enjoys video games, gets bored when reading, low self-esteem...
• Clothes labelled a certain size are always bigger than they say they are. Vanity sizing helps increase self esteem, and directly increases your likelihood of buying the piece of clothing.
• The overton window: extreme things make less extreme things look normal. This is dangerous for your perception of acceptable ideas. When Trump enjoys being on TV for supporting child rapists and sympathising with white supremacists, then tax breaks for the rich and taxing the poor don't look so bad now: thank fuck that's the only thing he's doing today.
• Roger Sperry, having won a Nobel prize for his split brain research ("language is on the left side of the brain, spatial reasoning on the right"), cautioned against generalising his findings. Obviously then, New York Times generalised his work in 1973, with a magazine titled "We are left-brained or right-brained"; Sperry never suggested that at all. The rest became pop culture and pseudoscience.
• People would rather work with a lovable fool than a competent jerk, even if they don't admit it. Competent jerks are mostly avoided, while lovable fools (the "friendly people who can't do anything" at your everyone workplace) is wanted more than jerks who work well.
• The larger a city is, the faster people walk there. The exact cause is unknown, but age (younger people live in cities) and economy (places where "time is money") are the suspects.
• As crime rate lowers, discussion about crime remains constant.
• The Hawthorne effect aka Observer effect: what people do changes if they know they are being watched. Different from Quantum superposition, where a particle is at two places at once until you look at it.
• The vitality curve, or stack ranking, or forced ranking, or "rank and yank", is the practice where employees are ranked against their coworkers, and the bottom 10% are fired every year. An automated system that ranks and yanks is an example of machines controlling humans.
• When someone tells you to do something, and you immediately dislike doing it because you are told to do something rather than out of your own free will, is a case of reactance.
• (Uber blog) When pictures of people are shopped into cars, men rate women higher than women rate men. In this experiment, the Bentley Continental was the only car found to make women rate the men higher than the same men in some other car.
• In social situations, people gauge how drunk they should be based on how drunk there peers are. Therefore, all patrons should play the game were if one person is late to the table, everyone should pretend to be hammered when he/she arrives, so he/she will overdrink.
• If you stand for nothing, you fall for everything. Watch a white man claiming to be a 7-year old Chinese female, and people accepting it.
• When accompanied by a slightly less attractive person who looks like you, you are more attractive to others around you.
• Talking to yourself in third person may somehow help with self control.1. In almost every country (except Central African Republic), giving money away makes you happier than if you kept it for yourself. In the same video, spending money on others has better returns per dollar than spending money on yourself; people who think about how they can beneft other people are happier than people who think about how they can benefit themselves.
• The difference between an obedient son and a momma's boy is that the latter is seen to give control of his own life to his mother.1. Kids at the age of two are called terrible twos for the tantrums they tend to release at around that age, when they start to learn the ability to be frustrated with something they cannot do.
• Those who have an IQ between 0 and 25 are idiots; IQs between 26 and 50 are considered imbeciles; and those who have an IQ between 51 and 70 are considered morons.
• Tons of people have sex when they grieve, including in the backseat of a car during a funeral. "Because I want to feel something else than this. It's either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire."
• Campus democrats are found to be less tolerant than republicans, when it comes to opposing views.
• Antidepressant use is linked to significant rise in suicide rates.
• "So bored I want to kill someone" has a name: cabin fever. The Shining was based on a kind of cabin fever.
• 90% of participants would switch the flip in the trolley problem, killing one instead of five. The percentage is much lower when that one person is one's lover.
• Women are more likely to have an SF (rather than an ST) than men in their Myers-Briggs Type Indicators.
• Watch your target partner (every so often), even when someone else in the group is talking. This makes your target partner think you care about their reactions.
• If you are given 2+ choices instead of 1, your expectation of the one you choose will go up (which means you will be less happy with it, even though you were given the choice to pick it). The take away is: choice isn't always good, and if you suck at cooking, don't ask your wife what she wants to eat.
• Even when pretending to play the piano, the group had motor skills improve despite not having played the piano. This shows the brain's mental training has the ability to change the physical properties of itself.
• "Fear of losing something" is why free trials work (on normal people). You give them something for free. They are so scared of having it taken away from them that they will pay to keep it.
• People view losses around twice as important as wins. This is called loss aversion. That means people don't tend to take risks to engage in a series of wins that are 1.9x more likely. Lesson: take risks even if you think (not you know) are 1:1 likely to lose.
• Referral programs work only if it makes the referrer feels smart about sharing a deal.
• If you want to control someone, look at her forehead. If you want to marry someone, make sure she's a female (or whatever), then look at her chin.
• None of the people who successfully committed suicide report regretting their decision. This is called suvivorship bias.
• People make extremely poor decisions. When presented with a three-year income graph, they would rather pick one with a rising pay, rather than one with falling pay, even if the total pay is higher for the latter.
• It is impossible to look at a scene and take a picture of it at the same time while still enjoying either.
• The least tolerant person wins as the highest common denominator.
• Children who did chores (have responsibility in general) end up being more successful.
• Amazon Mechnical Turk is an (unintended) excellent source of social science research participants.
• Dogs ought not walk in front of the pack leader (you).
• Miller's Law, the psychological theory that the average human has 7 +/- 2 short term memory "slots", was later revised in 2001 by Cowan to be 4 +/- 1 units, so don't feel too bad if you don't hit 7.
• How AYCE buffets save money: "[if a] relatively expensive protein (say, a platter of steak) [is] surrounded by four or five cheaper veggie side dishes [...] studies show that [...] people tend to pick and consume more vegetables. [...] potatoes and rice trays are huge and filled to the brim thus encouraging large servings. [...] Compared to those in the highest BMI tertile (top third), those in the lowest one were more than twice as likely to browse the buffet first (71.0% vs. 33.3%), almost three times as likely to use chopsticks rather than a fork (23.5% vs. 8.7%), and chew more times (14.8 vs. 11.9)."
• People with a psychological disorder might not believe they have an illness.
• If you can't draw a clock, you might have issues.
• Marissa Mayer avoids burnout by preventing herself from being cynical, discouraged, in addition to finding her "rhythm", whatever it is for each person. If you work better at night, allow yourself to work at night.
• The Sleeper Effect refers to the observation that people who badmouth others are less trusted. (Specifically, candidates who tell others not to vote for another candidate will receive fewer votes than if he/she had otherwise said nothing)
• Contrary to popular belief that liars don't look at you, they look at you more than the average person to compensate for that myth.
• Compared to printed book readers, it is less likely for an ebook reader to recall what was in the book.
• If a democracy would have an overwhelming amount of individuals with low capability quotients, simulations suggest that such a population would choose low capability quotient Heads of State.
• "Daddy issues" typically refers to seeking attention from men in order to compensate for the attention (she) may not have received from (her) father.
• If someone is watching you, then if you yawn, they might as well.
• Users think that skeleton loading screens are worse than not having one at all, and loading spinners make things load faster.
• The reported number of hours people spend on their phones per day varies wildly, from less than one hour, 2.7 hours, to 5. Just like the number of people who drink alcohol, it should also be surprising to hear that 30% don't check their phones in the morning, 40% just go to bed without checking their phones, and 50% don't use their phones during weekends.
• People prefer letters that are in their names. "The Letter Preference Task is the second-most popular method to measure implicit self-esteem, surpassed only by the Implicit Association Test."
• Incels as a collective are dangerous not because they can't get laid, but because they express their frustration with not getting laid, and their support groups become breeding ground for anger, resentment, and toxic ideas.
• Since sex is one of the things in a relationship with the most prereqs (time, mood, respect, trust, attraction, whatever), the lack of it is one of the first warning signs when the relationship is about to die.
• Asceticism is abstaining from pleasure. Lots of religions do that. In the ... essay What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? ... , Friedrich Nietzsche discusses what he terms the "ascetic ideal" and its role in the formulation of morality along with the history of the will. In the essay, Nietzsche describes how such a paradoxical action as asceticism might serve the interests of life: through asceticism one can overcome one's desire to perish from pain and despair and attain mastery over oneself. In this way one can express both ressentiment and the will to power.
• Dementia patients see the world differently. They don't know how clocks work, they think black mats on the floor are sinkholes, they think anything painted is real. They think they are kidnapped, escape, and get trapped at a fake bus stop because they don't remember how buses work.