Centipede's Dilemma
"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem which has given its name to an effect in psychology: the centipede effect (or centipede syndrome). This is when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it or reflection on it. For example a golfer thinking too closely about their swing or someone thinking too much about how they knot their tie may find their performance of the task impaired. The effect is also known as hyper-reflection or Humphrey's law after the English psychologist George Humphrey (1889-1966) who propounded it in 1923. As he wrote of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us".
Read more about Centipede's Dilemma: The Poem, In Psychology and Philosophy, Cultural References
Famous quotes containing the word dilemma:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)