Why are homes selling so slowly today? Because homes are still priced well above what people can afford to repay.

A person buys a computer solely on its ability to satisfy his wants. He does not believe there is any computer pyramid scheme that will make him rich by selling the computer to someone else.

The computer has the same ability to play music when the price declines. So eventually someone decides he would rather play music on the computer than eat N cheeseburgers. The computer sells.

Housing was priced far above its ability to satisfy wants. People priced housing according to its ability to make money selling it to the next guy. Schiff recently claimed at the Austrian Scholars Conference that the average home buyer in CA expected home prices to appreciate by 20% per year for the next 10 years.

When the price is appreciating by 20% each year, the buyer is not constrained to what he can afford to repay. As a result, he can pay much more. The housing supply appreciates to what he can pay.

Now that the pyramid scheme is over, people will price homes at its non-monetary value — its ability to keep your family warm, hold a BBQ, watch a football game.

The problem is that all these homes were already sold at ponzi-prices using debt. The ponzi prices are gone, but the debt remains.

The home cannot sell until defaulting on or repaying the debt. The man who sees value in keeping his family warm cannot afford to repay the debt. The institution who owns the home does not want to sell it to him at a price he can afford.

The price a man can afford to repay will cause the lending institution to lose money and possibly default. The institution will avoid and delay this loss the more a bailout is expected in the future.

So the price does not fall and home does not sell.

Slate has an article detailing how women are more likely to cave under pressure than men. The evidence is that women make more unforced errors when playing tennis as the score gets tight; men do not show this effect.

Other interesting evidence: men perform better when competing against anyone, but women only perform better when competing against women. In competition with men, women perform the same as if doing the task alone.

The article does not address whether this is due to innate sexual differences, cultural training or something unique to professional tennis players.

Jake Mandell is my hero. This guy is into neuroimaging and writes electronic music. It would be hard for me to think of a more intriguing resume. Check out his blog, his music and (especially) his tone-deaf test!

People modify the amount of calories they consume based on who they are around and how many calories they believe they are eating.

Women choose clothing that advertises their menstrual cycle; men catch the drift.

Fat people are stupider.

Averaging ugly girls together result in an ugly girl. Averaging attractive girls together result in attractive girls. Symmetry is not an important part of beauty. People assume attractive people are busier, more fun and everything else good.

Color strongly alters the potency of a placebo.

Psychologists show their respect for life by by turning lab rats into LED arrays.

Mind Hacks found out about a study that shows women seem to become physically stimulated unconsciously, whether or not they are mentally aroused.

This is unique to women; physical and mental sexual excitement go hand-in-hand for men.

Why could this be? What are the social implications of this? Are there biological and/or evolutionary factors behinds this?

In addition to the Philosopher’s Zone, ABC radio national has another great psychology-related program: All in the Mind. Recently they discussed pain.

Understanding pain requires us to think about the different way we feel things. Many things we feel on our body, like temperature and touch. Each temperature and touch sensation is associated with a physical location. We generally say things like: my feet are cold; you are touching my back; the coffee is warming my hands.

Other feelings do not have any clear physical location. When we feel an emotion it modifies our entire state of mind. We do not associate the emotion with any specific part of our body. How often has someone told you, “My foot is very angry today, but my thumb is ecstatic!”? Never. Because I am angry, not just my foot.

Emotions are also different because we cannot objectively measure them. Brainless tools will measure the heat in a nail or how hard a hammer presses on it. However, we have no tools that measure how angry a given nail is. The nail’s brain must make that judgement. For that matter, we do not have any precise machine that measures pain or pleasure on a scale from 1-10.

The brain decides what emotions to feel in part based on what physical sensations the body reports. The brain interprets them and then feels an emotion. This is what we mean when we say things like, “it feels good when you scratch there”.

Pain is special because it plays both roles. It is clearly physical. I say that my thumb specifically hurts. And you can generally see the cut, bruise or some other physical feature causing the pain. But the physical aggravation does not always cause pain. Athletes will often not experience pain until long after the cause. Probably you have cut or bruised yourself without knowing how too. Even after noticing, you may still not have experienced any pain.

Pain is not a simple sense in the same way that touch is. The body tells the mind things like something is torn and warm stuff is around it. The mind can then make the startling realization — “Oh my god! I’m bleeding!” — or just ignore it and go about its business — “whatever”.

So clearly a large aspect of pain is mental. No brain, no pain. For example, we do not waste time asking bent nails how bad the pain is and whether to call a doctor. However most considerate people stop to check up on someone they just banged with a hammer (or just skip straight to the apologizing).

In fact, some people continue to have pain long after the physical phenomenon is over. Little is known about why this happens, but All in the Mind interviewed people with such chronic pain. Pain attached itself to these people’s identity; they must now live with it every day of their lives.

The show talks about how difficult life is for these people. Since there is no longer any physical basis for the pain, standard medicine has no effect. The only recourse people have is to accept the presence of the pain but slowly teach themselves it doesn’t bother them. Amazingly this treatment can work. Although the pain never does go away, they can go off their medication and revert back to leading normal lives.

The holy grail of psychology is discovering the key to consciousness. Consciousness is what takes a bunch of external influences and organizes them into a stream of experience around a unified identity; it is how we experience things personally, the birthplace of the “I”. Unfortunately we know next to nothing about it.

We know consciousness does not rely on the majority of the physical body. I can cut off your arm or leg — even gouge out an eye or two. You will have little trouble considering yourself the same person. You can also destroy significant parts of your brain through surgery, seizure, injury or any other means without sacrificing your sense of self. I can call out your name: you will still answer (assuming you are capable of both hearing and responding to my call).

However damaging other parts of the brain — parts that are often physically small — is catastrophic. Without these functioning areas of the brain, you cease to be. Your body may well remain alive — and your mind active — but you no longer experience the world through your body from a first person perspective. The ghost no longer inhabits the shell.

At present, we understanding almost nothing about our high consciousness came to be, how it works, or where it resides.

For their part, philosophers attempt to elaborate on why consciousness is so special. There is a great example around 16 minutes into the September 30th, 2006 episode of the Philosopher’s Zone. Here the speaker contrasts how a camera experiences vision versus you or I.

Both you and the camera start with the same information. You receive the same input of light waves. You are both capable of distinguishing red light from blue, dark from light. But from here we do vastly different things with than information than will a camera.

There are millions of photoelectric diodes inside a camera. They roughly correspond to the many rods and cones in our retina. While the individual diodes are equally capable to our rods and cones, the individual inputs never become part of a unified whole. The camera gathers the data into a serialized summation. Every picture looks like this one. The camera never sees anything more than millions of colors.

We are unique because we experience the image personally. Instead of colors, we see objects. And the objects we see — including how prominently we see them — vary from person to person. If you have recently pierced your nose or want a nose job, you will likely see a very different version (this is why you see your car everywhere after you bought it; why a 65 pound anorexic adult looks in the mirror and sees a horribly fat person).

We take our experiences in the world and live out a personalized version in our own mind. A camera will only see the world at face value.

Freud is a powerful figure in Psychology, but today most Psychologists dismiss his work as neither useful nor scientific. However, there is no shortage of work for a Freudian psychoanalyst.

The Philosopher’s Zone has an interesting debate between one such psychoanalist and a psychologist. The subject of dreams — what they mean, where they come from.

We generally assume we dream while we are in REM sleep. An interesting point made by the psychoanalyst: the brain stem is responsible for creating REM sleep. But people with damaged brain stems can still dream — even though they never enter REM sleep. On the other hand, people who have damaged their frontal lobes cannot dream, even though they enter REM sleep. This seems like very good evidence that REM sleep and dreams are not related.

While reading rather interesting stuff at Mind Hacks, I ran across a link to Philosopher’s Zone. Podcasts about Philosophy and Psychology? Cool!

Awhile back Robert Wright interviewed Lorenzo Albacete, an ex-Physicist turned Theologist and Catholic University president. He makes an amazing point: while science can explain how things work the way they do, science does nothing to answer the question of why. Science — at least in its present form — is not capable of addressing these problems.

Science explains things in a completely different way to the way we personally experience them. The last chapter in Phantoms of the Brain — Do Martians See Red? — addresses this conundrum. Science can explain how we see things — the cells in our eyes that respond to specific frequencies of light that then enter our brain and excite other cells that activate other cells that have stored the concept of red. But this is categorically different to how we actually see red; Science explains everything from bee dancing to color vision the way a deaf person would explain the experience of listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Some people suffer strokes that make them blind. They say they cannot “see” anything. Ask them to put a paper into a slot that is either horizontal or vertical, studies show that a few will succeed every time. These people “see” in one sense of the term, but they damaged enough of their brain to render them incapable of experiencing seeing. These people are visual automatons.

Why do we not do everything in this automaton fashion? Why do we stand resolute, insisting against all evidence: “I exist. I am. Cogito ergo sum“?

Science cannot answer these questions. Science is not interested in these questions. Science simply concludes, “because”. Things exist; we exist; we see red; we love; this is how the world works; end of question; lets stick to answering how does all this work, how did things come to be…

But I am not here just because.

Yes, my body is here because of my parent’s DNA, the laws of Physics, the need for life to beget life.

Yes, my mind is here because of the endorphins, electrons and chemicals swirling around my brain and body.

But I am not my body.

I am not mind.

I am me. Myself.

My soul.

No one can take this away from me. No one can give this to me. It is completely personal. I created it for myself. It is made by me, for me, of me. Simply,

me.