Category: ideas

“[A] century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. … Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call ‘cross-situational stability.'”

“[W]hat if we’re wrong about daydreaming? What if it’s crucial to solving problems in our personal lives and at work? Brain scientists are beginning to suspect that it is. And if they’re right, we might need to rethink the way we work — perhaps even develop tools that actually encourage mental drift.”

“Got a bullying boss? Take solace in new research showing that leaders who feel incompetent really do lash out at others to temper their own inferiority.”

“The placebo effect is not only real; its ability to deaden pain has been pinpointed to cells in the spinal cord. That raises hopes for new ways of treating conditions such as chronic pain.”

“Quick! What color is sinfulness? What about moral purity? If you’re like most people, you naturally see sinfulness as tinged in black, while moral purity comes through in soft whites.” If this phenomenon is deep-seated in human nature, “is there anything we could or should do about it, especially in places like courtrooms?”

A new study has “found that it takes about half a second to transform something we think into something we say. And three very different kinds of processing needed for speech are all happening in a small part of the brain called Broca’s area….”

Barbara Ehrenreich: “If there has been a decline in happiness in America, and we don’t shape up well compared to other countries, including, weirdly, Finland, which I always thought of as very dour, it relates to all this work we do to make ourselves be more positive.”

The new study says: “First, people without a strong or consistent hand preference tend to be more creative than those who are strongly right- or left-handed. Second, there appears to be a way to stimulate innovative thinking in those with limited imaginations — at least in the short-term.”