Magical Thinking: Development and Applications

The course introduces you into a new developing area of human psychology – magical thinking, to which I gave over 30 years of my research. I will explain what magical thinking is, how it develops in children and functions in adults. I will then proceed with showing how magical thinking can be used in order to improve cognitive processes (such as creative thinking, perception and memory), and how powerful individuals and institutions can employ magical thinking for mind control with the aim of extracting political or economical gains. I will finish the course with examining how cultural and emotional factors affect magical thinking.

The course consists of four sections, which comprise an introductory lecture and 12 lectures. The lectures include author's text, author's videos, videos showing children experimenting with magical objects, graphs and pictures. Each lecture is accompanied with references to relevant author's publications.

The course targets a wide range of learners: students in social sciences, artists, writers, specialists on psychological factors in communication, politics, economics, education and everyone interested in learning more about hidden domains of the human mind.