Category: ideas

“Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.”

“[I]f you die anywhere in Italy, which I highly recommend, you get to lie in state in either an embellished hospital room or else the prettiest room in the family house, often air- conditioned, which for your benefit will be converted into what they call here ‘una camera ardente.“

“You couldn’t help but conclude that we live in an age of persuasion, where people’s wants, wishes, whims, pleas, brands, offers, enticements, truths, petitions and propaganda swirl in a ceaseless, growing multimedia firestorm of sales messages.”

“Invaluable though innovation may be, our relentless focus on it may be obscuring the value of its much-maligned relative, imitation. Imitation has always had a faintly disreputable ring to it — presidents do not normally give speeches extolling the virtues of the copycat. But where innovation brings new things into the world, imitation spreads them.”

A new study “illustrates how the brain can simultaneously keep track of two separate goals, even while it is busy performing a task related to one of the aims, hinting that the mind might be better at multitasking than previously thought.” Says one researcher, “This is the first time we observe in the brain concurrent representations of distinct rewards.”

“There are no ugly girls, no old hags in popular culture. Every week we are supposed to pretend like Tina Fey is ugly on 30 Rock, that America Ferrera was hideous even beneath the glasses and the braces on Ugly Betty … If that is the epitome of public ugliness, well, then the actual hags are way below the line of visibility. Women are allowed to have some power, but only if they’re hot.”

“Jealousy really is ‘blinding,’ according to a new study by two University of Delaware psychology professors. They found that women who were made to feel jealous were so distracted by unpleasant emotional images they became unable to spot targets they were trying to find.”

“In a series of experiments, people who counted money felt less pain when their hands were dipped into scalding water. The soothing power of cash also helped them shrug off the emotional pain of social exclusion.”

Complete with “the blob of recent regret” and “loud yet appallingly mild and clichéd R&B from through the wall.”