Category: ideas

“If economists ran research labs, how would they motivate scientists? Great ideas take time, effort, and perseverance. There are countless dead ends and failures along the way.”

“Many American teenagers are rebellious thrill-seekers who revel in immediate gratification and relinquish autonomy to peer pressure. But is it just the devil of biology that makes them do it? Or is American culture an accessory to the fact?” A Temple Univ. researcher has just received a $1 million grant to find out.

“Respect for elders may be universal in primates. Monkeys – just like humans – pay their elders special attention during conversation, apparently in order to garner some of the older animals’ wisdom.”

The Japanese are doing actual talking less and less on their mobiles, preferring to text or read cell-phone novels. Americans “won’t shut up,” though even they are left far behind by Puerto Ricans. The Spanish think voicemail is rude and always take calls, as do the Chinese, who might miss a business opportunity. And so on.

“New research in Political Research Quarterly … suggests that although your genes don’t predict which party you’ll belong to, they appear to play a major role in determining the extent to which you’ll belong.”

“The notion that ‘threat causes liberals to think like conservatives,’ to quote the title of a 2009 paper, has been repeatedly confirmed by social psychologists. But can that link – which arguably contributed to the re-election of President Bush in 2004 – be broken? A newly published paper suggests it can.”

“Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work.” But one’s memory of any given period has a significant effect on the ability to judge its duration: “if very few events come to mind, then the perception of time does not persist; the brain telescopes the interval that has passed.”

“Reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.”

“While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.”