Ophelia Deroy blog

Fast lemons and intuitive beliefs

Is a lemon fast or slow? Which one is brighter: the sound of a violin or the sound of a trombone? Got the answer? Without any apparent reason, you believe that lemons are fast and violins sound

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Why pink? Color matters

Just ask yourself : Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let's say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these

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Mad in America

Relativity of mental illness has enjoyed the favours of philosophers for decades (Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and, more recently Geoffrey Llyod in his Cognitive Variations). It has lead to the

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Some like it hot

Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being

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Why you should rank your friends (but not tell them)

Like me, you must sometimes receive these « rank your friends » messages through your social network. It starts by saying how high you have been ranked in someone’s best friends list, and

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Face value

As Dan was noticing last time, the ability to recognize individuals on the basis of faces (and voices) is quite fascinating. The ability to « read » unfamiliar faces is no less interesting, albeit

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Fame!

(Editor's note) Why are we interested in famous people? Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that social  information served as gossip is inherently interesting for us - information about

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