Jim Johnston

December 18, 2014

The Mind’s Eye and the Voice in Our Head

If you are reading this, it is impossible for you to imagine what it is like to not be able to think.  Your well-developed verbal repertoire […]
December 3, 2014

Kings X

I’m guessing that if you’ve shouted “Kings X!” while playing with friends, this means you are of a certain age.  When I was a child, this […]
November 1, 2014

Can dogs feel jealousy?

This was the question posed by a study recently published in PLoS ONE, a peer reviewed, online, scientific journal.  With this focus, aggregator sites quickly summarized […]
October 12, 2014

42

If you were watching “Jeopardy” and this title were the answer, your question would of course be, “What is The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, […]
September 22, 2014

The Problem with Problem Behavior as Communication

In common parlance, it is natural to talk about someone’s actions as communicating something.  We take note of something that someone does and infer what the […]
August 21, 2014

What is “___________?”

A recent question posted on the Students of Applied Behavior Analysis Facebook page focused on the nature of frustration and generated a fairly long thread that […]
August 11, 2014

A Strange Thought Experiment

A question was recently posed on Quora (one of my favorite websites) that I found intriguing.  It asked, in essence, what would happen if an individual […]
July 27, 2014

Salience and difficulty

Discussions of ways of improving stimulus control over a target behavior sometimes refer to augmenting the “salience” of antecedent stimuli.  Such uses of this term are formalized […]
July 6, 2014

“Can,” “can’t,” and self-fulfilling prophecies

Our daily dialect is laden with implications.  Take the words, “can” and “can’t.”  When we say that we can do something, we make an implicit prediction.  […]