Category: ideas

“Although it’s frowned upon in business school, some managers think of anger as a motivational tool. … Newly published research from Israel suggests this blow-your-stack strategy can produce the desired results – but only when workers are performing relatively simple tasks. If their job requires creative problem-solving, the catalyst you crave may be caustic contempt.”

“A study links life-changing religious experiences, like being born again, with atrophy in the hippocampus.”

A survey of 1,700 research scientists by sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund found that “22 percent of those who describe themselves as atheists also consider themselves to be spiritual.” So she interviewed 275 of them to find out just what they mean by that.

“Welcome to the new focus group. Be it making collages or using mobile applications that track participants’ purchases minute by minute, advertisers are experimenting with new ways to learn about what consumers think of their products.”

“‘Tight’ refers to nations that have strong social norms and low tolerance for deviation from those norms, whereas another term, ‘loose,’ refers to nations with weak social norms and a high tolerance for deviation from them.” Researchers in a recent study “found that countries such as Japan, Korea, Singapore and Pakistan are much tighter whereas countries such as the Ukraine, Israel, Brazil and the United States are looser.”

“A small research arm of the U.S. government’s intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors. That’s right, metaphors, like Shakespeare’s famous line, ‘All the world’s a stage,’ or more subtly, ‘The darkness pressed in on all sides’.”

Alva Noë: “We haven’t found it there, and we won’t. Not because consciousness happens somewhere else, in the soul, say, or in the environment, or in the collective. But because consciousness isn’t something that happens; it is something we do or make. … Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for dance in the legs.”

“If rich countries were to admit enough migrants from poor countries to expand their own labour forces by a mere 3%, the world would be richer, according to one estimate, by $356 billion a year. Completely opening borders would add an astonishing $39 trillion over 25 years to the global economy. That is more than 500 times the amount the rich world spends on foreign aid each year. Migration is the most effective tool yet devised for reducing global poverty.”

“ASL signers say that they spend much more time thinking about and dealing with language than most Americans, resulting in a rich and independent tradition of Deaf language arts – literature, theater, journalism. Deaf people have their own clubs, their own rituals, their own places of worship, their own newspapers, their own sense of humor.”

“In both overt and subtle ways, Americans are constantly being encouraged to take action, and exposure to such messages makes us more liable to ignore dissenting ideas.”