Why People Choose Ghosting After Breakup?

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but breaking up with someone is hard. There’s the rejection, the tears, the possible shouting and if nothing else, it’s just really awkward! Maybe that’s why, for better or worse, some people decide a proper break-up isn’t worth it. Instead, they choose to just, disappear. In other words, they ghost.

Ghosting is when someone terminates a relationship by ending communications abruptly and without explanation. It’s something people have probably been doing forever, but the word has only started to pick up steam within the last few years. In fact, it’s picked up so much steam that psychologists have started to study it. Recently, they have begun investigating why people do this and their results suggest that at least some of it might have to do with how people view relationships in general.

If it’s never happened to you, ghosting might seem like some weird, worst-case-scenario Internet thing, but it actually happens all the time. For example, in a 2018 study that polled almost 750 people, 23% of participants reported being ghosted by a romantic partner. And almost 40% reported being ghosted by a friend. Studies have even found that people ghost employers or potential employers by not responding to offers or by not showing up for work or interviews.

This isn’t a Millennial or Gen Z thing, either, because ghosting isn’t new. The term may have started getting traction recently, but this behaviour has probably been around forever. It’s just that, for your grandparents, “ghosting” might have looked like not sending letters or skipping phone calls.

This phenomenon has likely become such a Thing because technology has changed the way many people communicate. Texting and social media have made communication easier and more instantaneous and many relationships or jobs are now started through apps and e-mails instead of in-person meetups. Among other things, that makes it really easy to avoid someone if you think things aren’t going to work out. When it comes to why people do this, though, there likely isn’t just one answer.

Like, in a 2019 study published in Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, participants reported that they ghosted someone because of everything from attractiveness to convenience to safety, Which is quite a range of explanations. Other researchers, though, have suggested that how you feel about ghosting could be based on something more fundamental: how you think about relationships more broadly.

Research on relationship theories covers two types of beliefs: destiny and growth. If you are a stronger believer in destiny, it means you think that the outcome of a relationship is more set in stone: It’s either going to work out, or it’s not. This is associated with a fixed mindset, and if you think like this, you might believe that you have a soulmate, someone who is fundamentally a perfect match. 

On the other hand, if you are a stronger believer in growth, it means you think relationships can grow over time. If you think like this, you probably believe that all relationship hurdles can eventually be overcome.

In that 2018 study mentioned earlier, the researchers didn’t just look at how frequently people ghosted. They also asked participants about their relationship beliefs and they found that stronger destiny beliefs led to more positive views toward ghosting. 

More specifically, when compared to people with weaker destiny beliefs, this group was about 63% more likely to say that ghosting was an acceptable way to end a long-term relationship. Those with stronger growth beliefs tended to say the opposite.

This may have happened because people with stronger destiny beliefs are often quicker to end a relationship when they don’t think it’s a good fit. Alternatively, these results could be related to whether participants thought they could be friends with someone after a breakup. If they didn’t, they might not have cared as much about how that person responded to being ghosted. 

Now, we are not here to make sweeping claims about how you personally should end your relationships; we are just here to talk about what psychologists have observed. Because, really, it’s super fascinating that this is even something researchers have studied.

Ultimately, while all kinds of survey participants have different opinions on whether ghosting is okay, the overarching theme seems to be that there are better ways to end relationships. If nothing else, ghosting doesn’t allow someone closure and if there is something they could have done better, it doesn’t give them a chance to learn.

In the long run, this may also make it harder for the ghoster to communicate disinterest or what isn’t going well for them. In a professional setting, well, the employer suddenly has an unexpected vacancy, which isn’t great.

Every relationship is different, though, so whether you want to ghost because of safety or a destiny mindset, we will leave those decisions up to you.

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How Sugar Can Be So Addictive?

Picture warm, gooey cookies, crunchy candies, velvety cakes, waffle cones piled high with ice cream. Is your mouth watering? Are you craving dessert? Why? What happens in the brain that makes sugary foods so hard to resist?

Sugar is a general term used to describe a class of molecules called carbohydrates and it's found in a wide variety of food and drink. Just check the labels on sweet products you buy, Glucose, Fructose, Sucrose, Maltose, Lactose, Dextrose and Starch are all forms of sugar. So are high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, raw sugar, and honey. And sugar isn't just in candies and desserts, it's also added to tomato sauce, yoghurt, dried fruit, flavoured waters, or granola bars.

Since sugar is everywhere, it's important to understand how it affects our brain. What happens when sugar hits your tongue? And does eating a little bit of sugar make you crave more? 

So let's find answers to those question. You take a bite of cereal. The sugars it contains activate the sweet-taste receptors, part of the taste buds on the tongue, in your brain. These receptors send a signal up to the brain stem and from there, it forks off into many areas of your forebrain, one of which is the cerebral cortex.

Different sections of the cerebral cortex process different tastes: bitter, salty, umami and, in our case, sweet. From here, the signal activates the brain's reward system of your brain. This reward system is a series of electrical and chemical pathways across several different regions of the brain. It's a complicated network, but it helps answer a single, subconscious question: should I do that again?

That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you taste a chocolate cake? That's your reward system saying, "Mmm, yes!" And it's not just activated by food. Socializing, sexual behaviour and drugs are just a few examples of things and experiences that also activate the reward system.

But overactivating this reward system kickstarts a series of unfortunate events for you. Like, loss of control, craving and increased tolerance to sugar.

Let's get back to our bite of cereal ok. It travels down into your stomach and eventually into your gut. And guess what? There are sugar receptors here, too. They are not taste-buds, but they do send signals telling your brain that you are full or that your body should produce more insulin to deal with the extra sugar you are eating. 

The major currency of our reward system is dopamine, an important chemical or neurotransmitter. There are many dopamine receptors in the forebrain, but they are not evenly distributed. Certain areas contain dense clusters of receptors, and these dopamine hot spots are a part of your reward system. 

Drugs like alcohol, nicotine or heroin send dopamine into overdrive, leading some people to constantly seek that high, in other words, to be addicted. Sugar also causes dopamine to be released, though not as violently as drugs. 

Sugar is rare among dopamine-inducing foods. Broccoli, for example, has no effect, which probably explains why it's so hard to for me to eat veggies, maybe it's true for you too.

Speaking of healthy foods, let's say you're hungry and decide to eat a balanced meal. You do and dopamine levels spike in your reward system hot spots. But if you eat that same dish many days in a row, your dopamine levels will spike less and less, eventually levelling out. That's because when it comes to food, our brain evolved to pay special attention to new or different tastes. Why?

Two reasons: first, to detect food that's gone bad for you. And second, because the more variety you have in your diet, the more likely you are to get all the nutrients you need. To keep that variety up, we need to be able to recognize new foods and more importantly, we need to want to keep eating new foods. And that's why the dopamine levels off when a food becomes boring.

Now, back to that meal. What happens if, in place of the healthy balanced dish, you eat sugar-rich food instead? If you rarely eat sugar or don't eat much at a time, the effect is similar to that of the balanced meal. But if you eat too much, the dopamine response does not level out. In other words, eating lots of sugar will continue to feel rewarding. In this way, sugar behaves a little bit like a drug.

It's one reason people seem to be hooked on sugary foods. So, think back to all those different kinds of sugar. Each one is unique, but every time any sugar is consumed, it kickstarts a domino effect in the brain that sparks a rewarding feeling. 

Too much, too often, and things can go into overdrive. So, yes, overconsumption of sugar can have addictive effects on the brain, but a wedge of cake once in a while won't hurt you. So do eat sweet, because you need it. Just don't eat too much.

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What Is Game Theory?

Game theory as we know it today came about in part because of one man’s interest in poker. This man was not just your average man on the street. He was a mathematician, physicist and computer scientist named John von Neumann. 

His goal was loftier than becoming a better poker player. He was only interested in poker because he saw it as a path toward developing the mathematics of life itself. He wanted a general theory – he called it ‘Game Theory’ – that could be applied to diplomacy, war, love, evolution or business strategy.

He moved closer toward that goal when he collaborated with economist Oskar Morgenstern on a book called "A Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" in 1944.

The Library of Economics and Liberty (Econlib) states that in their book, von Neumann and Morgenstern asserted that any economic situation could be defined as the outcome of a game between two or more players.

What is a game according to game theory? Yale economics professor Ben Polak notes a game has three basic components: players, strategies and payoffs. As we just mentioned, game theory applies to games involving two or more players. In a game, players share “common knowledge” of the rules, available strategies, and possible payoffs of a game. However, it is not always the case that players have “perfect” knowledge of these elements of a game.

Strategies are the actions that players take in a game. The strategy is at the heart of the game theory. The theory presented in A Theory of Games and Economic Behavior as the mathematical modelling of a strategic interaction between rational adversaries, where each side’s actions would depend on what the other side would do.

The concept of strategic interdependence – the actions of one player influencing the actions of the other players – is one important aspect of von Neumann’s version of game theory that is still relevant today.

Then there are payoffs, which one source describes as the “outcome of the strategy applied by the player.” Payoffs could be a wide range of things depending on the game. It could be profits, a peace treaty or getting a great deal on a land.

One limitation of Von Neumann’s version of game theory is that it focused on finding optimal strategies for one type of game called a zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, one player's loss is the other player's gain. A source notes that players can neither increase nor decrease the available resources in zero-sum games.

Critics have noted that life is often not as simple as a zero-sum game. More complicated game scenarios are possible in the real world. For example, players can do things like find more resources or form coalitions that increase the gains of several players. Game theory has evolved to analyze a wider range of games such as combinatorial games and differential games, but we have time to look at only one.

A classic example of a game often studied in game theory is called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. There are two prisoners, Jack and Tom, who have just been captured for robbing a bank. The police don't have enough evidence to convict them but know that they committed the crime.

They put Jack and Tom in separate inter[r]ogation rooms and lay out the consequences: If both Jack and Tom confess they will each get 10 years in prison. If one confesses and the other doesn't, the one who confessed will go free and the other will spend 20 years in prison. If neither person confesses, they will both get 5 years for a different crime they were wanted for.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma contains the basic elements of a game. The two players are Jack and Tom. There are two strategies available to them: confess or don’t confess. The payoffs of the game range from going free to serving 5,10, or 20 years in prison.

Let's see and compare these outcomes (payoffs) As they are put into a matrix: Since Tom's strategies are listed in rows or the x-axis, his payoffs are listed first. Jack's payoffs are listed second because his strategies are in columns or on the y-axis. ‘C’ means ‘confess’ and ‘NC’ means ‘not confess.’ This matrix is called ‘Normal Form’ in game theory.

Moves are simultaneous, which means that neither player knows the other's decision and decisions are made at the same time. In this example, both prisoners are in separate rooms and won't be let out until they have both made their decision. 

One common solution to simultaneous games is known as the “dominant strategy.”  It is defined as the “strategy that has the best payoff no matter what the other player chooses.” Tom does not know if Jack will confess or not. He takes a look at his options. If Jack confesses and Tom does not, Tom will get 20 years in prison. If both Jack and Tom confess, Tom will get only 10 years. If Jack does not confess and Tom does, Tom will go free. 

The best strategy for Tom is to confess because it leads to the best payoffs regardless of Jack’s actions. Confessing will cause Tom to either go free or serve less prison time than if he did not confess. Jack is in the same situation and has the same options as Tom. As a result, the best strategy for Jack is also to confess because it leads to the same best payoffs that Tom will get.

One study states that a dominant strategy equilibrium is reached when each player chooses their own dominant strategy. Why is the strategy of both not confessing not the best choice? While this option would give both of them less prison time than if they confessed, it would work only if each of them could be sure the other one would not confess.

It is unknown whether Tom and Jack would be able to work together with that level of cooperation. In addition, both are unlikely to choose the strategy of not confessing because it has a greater penalty than they would get if they confessed. Confessing also gives each of them the possibility of serving no prison time, which is even less than 5 years in prison.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a good example of how rationality can be problematic in game theory. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver researcher Yamin Htun calls it “one of the most debatable issues in game theory.” 

Htun points out that almost all of the theories are based on the assumption that agents are rational players who strive to maximize their utilities (payoffs).  Yet studies demonstrate that players do not always act rationally and that “the conclusions of rational analysis sometimes fail to conform to reality.

As we can see from this game, the most rational strategy that would give both players less prison time was not the best choice, while a choice that involves both players doing more prison time was.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma also reflects how other game theorists were able to fix some of the problems with Von Neumann’s version of game theory. One of them was mathematician John Nash.

He found a way to determine optimal strategies in any finite game. He describes the Nash equilibrium as a particular solution to games—one marked by the fact that each player is making out the best he or she possibly can, given the strategies being employed by all of the other players. 

When Nash equilibrium is reached in a game, none of the players wants to change to another strategy because doing so will lead to a worse outcome than the current strategy. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Nash equilibrium is the strategy of both players confessing. There is no other better option for either player to switch to.

From this game, we can also see another interesting aspect of the Nash equilibrium. Mathematician Iztok Hozo points out that any dominant strategy equilibrium is also a Nash equilibrium. He explains that this is because the Nash equilibrium is an extension of the concepts of dominant strategy equilibrium. However, he notes that the Nash equilibrium can be used to solve games that do not have a dominant strategy.

Nash received great praise for the Nash equilibrium and his other work in game theory – but not from John von Neumann. According to Forbes, “Von Neumann, consumed with envy, dismissed the young Nash's result as ‘trivial’-- meaning mathematically simple.” 

Others did not share in Von Neumann’s assessment of Nash’s work. Nash, Reinhard Selten, and John Harsanyi went on to share the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work in game theory. 

Nash’s most fundamental contribution to game theory was in opening the field up to a wider range of applications and different scenarios to be studied. Without his breakthrough, much of what followed in game theory might not have been possible.

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Facing Your Fears Can Help You Conquer Them, But How?

You may have heard that facing your fears is the best way to conquer them. As it turns out, this is actually pretty scientific advice and is the basis for a technique called exposure therapy. This kind of therapy has been used in some form or another since the 1950s and it’s designed to help people overcome intense fears and anxieties by exposing them to whatever they’re afraid of. While that might sound totally counter-intuitive, it’s all based on some pretty basic and well-tested psychology.

Exposure therapy is a psychological treatment that was developed to help people confront their fears. When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared objects, activities or situations. Although this avoidance might help reduce feelings of fear in the short term, over the long term it can make the fear become even worse. In such situations, a psychologist might recommend a program of exposure therapy in order to help break the pattern of avoidance and fear. In this form of therapy, psychologists create a safe environment in which to “expose” individuals to the things they fear and avoid. The exposure to the feared objects, activities or situations in a safe environment helps reduce fear and decrease avoidance. 

In general, there’s nothing wrong with being afraid. After all, fear is a big part of what’s kept humans around for so long. But people with conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder or phobias experience extreme levels of fear that make it difficult to live their lives. Exposure therapy is designed to help people overcome those kinds of debilitating fear. It’s centred on the idea that fears can be learned and unlearned.

This is related to a concept in psychology called conditioning specifically, Classical or Pavlovian conditioning. It was named after famous experiments done by Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s and it involves a stimulus becoming associated with a specific outcome.

In Pavlov’s experiments, dogs learned that whenever someone rang a bell, they got food. So they came to associate the bell with food and developed a positive reaction to it. In that case, they salivated in anticipation of being fed. Other experiments showed that this type of conditioning can be true for negative stimuli, too Like, if someone is bitten by a dog, they might associate dogs with pain and fear and develop a phobia of them.

These results have been duplicated in tons of experiments over the years, but what’s most important for exposure therapy is that these associations can also be extinguished, or unlearned, through conditioning.

So if someone with a phobia of dogs had repeated exposure to the animals without being bitten, their link between dogs and pain would likely disappear. This process is the same no matter where the association comes from, too.

So no matter where someone learned to fear something, facing their fear in a controlled environment can still help them extinguish it. That’s a big part of what exposure therapy is based on controlled-safe fear extinguishing. It’s about either teaching someone to overcome a fear or to manage and process their anxieties in a more helpful way.

There are a few different types of this therapy, and the exposure part can take several forms. For one, a fear can either be imagined or experienced in vivo, meaning in real life. Some fears, like fear of spiders, are safe for in vivo exposure. Others, like the fear of combat that some veterans experience, typically aren’t safe and practical to repeat in real life, so these rely on imagined or even virtual reality exposure. 

There are also different strategies for how much and how fast to expose patients to their fears. Most exposure therapy involves what’s called graded exposure or starting small and gradually ramping up. Often, it begins with imagined exposures and advances to in vivo.

For example, a therapist might guide a patient in thinking about a spider, and in performing relaxation techniques like slow breathing to manage their fear response. Then, when the imaginary spider doesn’t cause fear anymore, the patient will look at a real spider behind glass. Eventually, they might move from looking at the spider without glass to potentially touching and holding it.

Another technique is called flooding. Unlike graded exposure, it involves facing the most feared scenario all at once. While this is much scarier for the patient at first, if performed correctly, it also results in them realizing they don’t need to respond to their fears in such an extreme way. However, because this is more difficult for both the patient and the psychologist, graded exposure therapy is used most often.

Of course, like all types of therapies, exposure therapy isn’t equally helpful for everyone. In some cases with phobias and PTSD, it’s even been reported to make fears worse. Scientists speculate that this might happen if the therapy isn’t performed correctly, or for long enough. Also, in general, it’s especially difficult to treat social anxiety with exposure therapy although it has helped plenty of people.

It isn’t clear why social anxiety is harder, but it could be because social interactions happen every day. This means it’s more difficult to isolate and control the severity of interactions, which is necessary for patients to process their fears.

Overall, though, exposure therapy is highly effective, and this has been shown by numerous studies. Like, one 2010 meta-analysis of 13 different studies examining 675 total patients with PTSD found that 86% showed significant improvement after exposure therapy. A 2007 meta-analysis of 300 patients across 21 studies reported similar success in treating specific phobias.

While it’s most commonly used to treat PTSD and phobias, exposure therapy has also been shown to effectively treat panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Research is even showing that virtual reality therapy is just as effective as in vivo exposure. Which could be a big deal for people who can’t safely face their fears in real life.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should rush out to the woods and find a spider to expose your arachnophobic friend to. Like other kinds of therapy, exposure therapy is meant to be done by a trained professional in a controlled environment. But if your friend wants to learn more about how it works?  Read This Book

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IQ Test | How We Determine How Smart You Are?

IQ, intelligence quotient, is defined as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do. In short, IQ means how smart/intelligent you are.

IQ test or Intelligence test which gives you a score and we think that’s it. But the reality is different. If a person can do Quick Reasoning, Quick Problem Solving then that person is considered as a smart or higher IQ person. That’s partially true IQ depends on many factor Brain and Knowledge is just two variable of a bigger equation. Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a very general mental capability.

Your intelligence and smartness surely depend on how much knowledge you have. But if you are not wise enough then IQ test Score is valueless. We all know that wisdom comes with Knowledge and Experience. So while cognitive abilities(e.g., abstract reasoning, working memory, vocabulary, visual-spatial mental rotation) of our brain is a dominant part of our intelligence factor, non-cognitive part of our brain dictate our action.

So what else we have to consider to know our IQ level?
The answer is simple consider IQ Test Score along with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality, welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty. And you can now tell someone's IQ level accurately.



That’s the problem. Those above mentions part of someone’s life can’t be represented in numbers or in 1&0, they can’t be comprehend. We have failed to understand ourselves 100%. If we ever understand ourselves fully then we will be able to predict IQ Score 100% accurately. Till that day today's IQ Test is best we have got.

Any single person’s IQ test performance is itself a measure of many things in addition to their intellectual functioning across a range of cognition, including the person’s duration of education, motivation, level of test anxiety, self-belief, history of traumatic experience and opportunities, language, and many other things that are strongly connected to the very outcomes we are trying to predict. So take an IQ test today and start to understand yourself and improve as well as gain more knowledge and wisdom.
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