Category: ideas

Does The Fear Of Death Move Merch?

A trio of consumer researchers finds that “thinking about one’s demise motivates people to form a strong connection to their material possessions, specifically to the brands that they have purchased. In the face of the great unknown, people develop ‘strong brand identity,’ a melding of their personalities and their possessions.”

To Memory Nothing Is Ever Really Lost (Except When It Is)

“For researchers who study memory, the ease with which people forget jokes is one of those quirks, those little skids on the neuronal banana peel, that end up revealing a surprising amount about the underlying architecture of memory. And there are plenty of other similarly illuminating examples of memory’s whimsy and bad taste — like why you may forget your spouse’s birthday but will go to your deathbed remembering every word of the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ theme song.”

Study: Studying Music Changes The Brain

“Scans of the brains of child musicians before and after musical training have yielded compelling evidence that proficiency and skill relies on hard graft, not innate genius. Earlier studies have shown that adult musicians have different brains to adult non-musicians. But the latest results settle arguments about whether the brain differences were there from birth, or developed through practice.”

Setting Goals – A Recipe For Failure?

“Among psychologists, the link between setting goals and achievement is one of the clearest there is, with studies on everyone from woodworkers to CEOs showing that we concentrate better, work longer, and do more if we set specific, measurable goals for ourselves. But a few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side.”

Doodling Helps Kick-Start Your Brain When It’s Bored

“[Bill] Gates is a doodler, and he’s not alone. Lyndon Johnson doodled. Ralph Waldo Emerson doodled. Ronald Reagan drew pictures of cowboys, horses and hearts crossed with arrows. Most of us doodle at one point or another. But why? To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored.”