The Neuroscience Of What Jokes Are Funny "Despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold."

New Scientist 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/08/10@08:06AM

An Ancient Language Goes Extinct "A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever in India's Andaman Islands, taken to the grave with its last speaker."

Discovery 02/07/10

email this story | Posted 02/07/10@09:01PM

Internet - Friend Or Foe? John "Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age."

The Observer (UK) 02/07/10

email this story | Posted 02/07/10@09:21AM

Movement = Mood? A new study "finds an ostensibly meaningless physical activity -- moving marbles upward -- can cause people to think more positive thoughts."

Miller-McCune 02/04/10

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Of Brain Waves And Broken Promises Results of a study in Switzerland "suggest that it may indeed be possible to detect whether a person is about to break a promise based on brain activity, well before the promise is actually broken."

Scientific American 02/02/10

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Adolescents - You Really Can't Reason With Them "There are powerful forces - such as the brain's reaction to the presence of peers as a potent prompt and reward for sensation-seeking - that can move an adolescent to select risky behavior as the 'right' choice. … When you sit down to explain to your early adolescent why it's unwise to climb the town water tower to have sex with predicate felons while doing nitrous, you're acting on two assumptions that we now know to be false."

Slate 02/04/10

email this story | Posted 02/04/10@09:39PM

Our College Careers Make More Difference Than We Thought "[D]oes the sense of purpose we feel as we leave school really stick with us as the years go by? And does it influence the kind of adults we grow into? Newly published research suggests the answers are yes and yes."

Miller-McCune 02/02/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@09:46PM

Finding The Funny Bone In The Brain "[D]espite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold."

New Scientist 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@09:30PM

Merely Seeing Expensive Stuff Can Make You More Selfish "For the good of us all, step away from the Rolex. The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study."

Victoria (BC) Times-Colonist (Reuters) 02/02/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:42PM

Medieval Trial By Ordeal - Did It Actually Work? Throw the suspect into a pool: if he floats, he's guilty; if he sinks, he's innocent. Or make the perp hold a red-hot iron, and if God heals the burn in three days, she is blameless. Today such methods of justice are dismissed as ignorant and barbaric, but a U. Chicago professor argues that, by leveraging defendants' own superstitions, trial by ordeal made it "possible to secure criminal justice where it would have otherwise been impossible to do so."

Boston Globe 01/31/10

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Our Bodies Act Out Metaphors In Language "Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded. ... The body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically. "

The New York Times 02/02/10

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Why Does It Feel Like Time Moves Faster As We Get Older? "This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world. No one is sure where this feeling comes from. Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory."

NPR 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/01/10@07:54PM

Easy Going (Why Our Brains Like It) One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called "cognitive fluency." Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.

Boston Globe 01/31/10

email this story | Posted 02/01/10@07:01AM

The 'Long Tail' Reaches Manufacturing Chris Anderson: "The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital - the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing - the long tail of things."

Wired 01/25/10

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Competition, National Happiness, And The Bagging Of Groceries What the National Grocers Association's Best Bagger Championship "illustrates most is how the recognition for doing something well, and the desire to do it even better that that recognition prompts, enriches [the competitors'] lives on an everyday basis." And a "country cannot be great without great grocery store baggers - their speed, courtesy, and ability to keep our spaghetti sauce from crushing our hot dog buns is crucial to maintaining public morale."

Reason 01/28/10

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Perfectionism: Helpful Asset Or Crippling Obstacle? "Adaptive perfectionism" (the good kind) correlates with "striving for excellence, organizational skills, tendency to plan ahead and holding others to high standards"; "maladaptive perfectionism" with "concern over mistakes, need for approval, tendency to ruminate over past performances and perceived [external] pressure."

Miller-McCune 01/28/10

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Things Are Out Of My Control (My Horoscope Said So) "[W]hen individuals are unable to gain a sense of control objectively, they will try to gain it perceptually. … Feelings of control are essential for our well-being - we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, so we instinctively seek out patterns to regain control - even if those patterns are illusory."

Scientific American February 2010

email this story | Posted 01/28/10@09:58PM

Five Stages Of Dying? Sure. Five Stages Of Grief? Not So Much. "Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. … In On Grief and Grieving, [Elisabeth Kübler-Ross] insisted that the stages were 'never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.' If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable."

The New Yorker 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 01/28/10@09:49PM

Democrat Or Republican? You Can Tell From The Head Shot "In a study published in the January 18 issue of PLoS One, subjects were able to accurately identify candidates from the 2004 and 2006 U.S. Senate elections as either Democrats or Republicans based on black-and-white photos of their faces. And subjects were even able to correctly identify college students as belonging to Democratic or Republican clubs based on their yearbook photos."

Scientific American 01/27/10

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When Urban Foodies Turn To Yoga "India has become to American yoga what France is to American cuisine: an ancient source of wisdom to be reinterpreted, democratized and repackaged by its acolytes here." Much of that reinterpretation is now happening around food: "yogier-than-thou" vegans; the use of bacon as "a yogic teaching tool"; a coach telling her class, "Ssssmell the squassshhhh waaaafting through the air."

New York Times 01/27/10

email this story | Posted 01/27/10@09:44PM

'A Behavioral Economist's Dream': D.C. Charges A Nickel For Plastic Grocery Bags "Thousands of people have altered long-held behavior overnight. Businesses are operating differently. The way people eat, shop and interact with each other has changed. And hundreds have been moved to fiery message-board debates about the proper role of government and at what point it's gone too far."

Miller-McCune 01/26/10

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The Reason For Our Weak Willpower? Our Weak Brains "Knowing something is the right thing to do takes work -- brain work -- and our brains aren't always up to that."

NPR 01/26/10

email this story | Posted 01/26/10@05:51AM

Of Music And Choice "Our results suggest that a principal mechanism whereby popularity ratings affect consumer choice is through the anxiety generated by the mismatch between one's own preferences and the others'. This mismatch anxiety motivates people to switch their choices in the direction of the consensus."

Miller-McCune 01/25/10

email this story | Posted 01/25/10@08:55AM

Always On - Study Says Kids Always Online "The average young American now spends practically every waking minute -- except for the time in school -- using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation."

The New York Times 01/20/10

email this story | Posted 01/24/10@05:25PM

In US Schools, Foreign Language Instruction Fades (Except For One) "Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade … But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese."

New York Times 01/21/10

email this story | Posted 01/21/10@09:44PM

The Horticultural Parable And The Existence Of God Two people return to a long-abandoned garden and find that a few of their old plants are still thriving amidst the weeds. One person says that some gardener must have been tending to the plants; the other says it's all happenstance. The pair hide, watch and wait, but no gardener ever appears. But still the believer insists that there's a gardener; the skeptic asks what the difference is between an invisible gardener and an imaginary one.

Intelligent Life Winter 2010

email this story | Posted 01/20/10@09:52PM

Clay Shirky Figures Out What's Holding Women Back "I'm worried … [that] not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. … They aren't just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so." (What, doesn't he know any opera singers?)

Shirky.com 01/15/10

email this story | Posted 01/20/10@09:41PM

Screwing Up On A Test May Be Better Than Studying For It Experimental psychologists are finding that making big, embarrassing mistakes on tests and quizzes can lead to more effective and thorough learning than simply getting answers right the first time. ("Fear and failure are good motivators.")

Miller-McCune 01/19/10

email this story | Posted 01/19/10@10:06PM

The Truth About Newton And the Apple It didn't bonk him in the head. The scientist told his first biographer that when "the notion of gravitation came into his mind," it "was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself."

New Scientist 01/18/10

email this story | Posted 01/19/10@10:00PM

The Connection Between Fame And Hypochondria "Today we appear to have excelled the hypochondriac cultures of the past by elevating the morbidly self-involved to the level of paragon. Hollywood has long been the land of fixed teeth and busts, blurred hairlines and effaced waistlines. But fame increasingly consists in a state of almost constant near-collapse."

Wall Street Journal 01/16/10

email this story | Posted 01/18/10@05:52PM

Information Overload - The Risks Of Too Much Information As certain scientists and philosophers see it, the discovery and dissemination of knowledge is far from being an unqualified boon. We might be in danger of knowing too much. "Information can potentially be extremely dangerous,"

New Scientist 01/15/10

email this story | Posted 01/18/10@09:01AM

Advice For Writing In English As A Second (Or Even First) Language William Zinsser to new international students at Columbia's journalism school: "The words derived from Latin are the enemy - they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. … Short Anglo-Saxon nouns are your second-best tools as a journalist writing in English. What are your best tools? Your best tools are short, plain Anglo-Saxon verbs."

The American Scholar Winter 2010

email this story | Posted 01/17/10@11:52AM

Why We Misremember All Those Famous Movie Quotes "Play it again, Sam." "Excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable." "Me Tarzan, you Jane." "Come with me to the Casbah." "Greed is good." None of those iconic lines was actually uttered in the movies from which they supposedly came. Yet there are good reasons that the quotations changed as they slipped into our collective cultural memory.

New York Times Magazine 01/17/10

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Two More Reasons For Being Religious: Sex And Stress Relief "Men and women shown dating profiles of attractive members of the same sex will describe themselves as more religious than people who don't feel as if they have to compete in the attractiveness stakes. Meanwhile, another study finds that thoughts of randomness push people toward God - but only if they can't attribute feelings of stress to some easily defined external factor."

New Scientist 01/14/10

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Environmentalism As A (Post-)Modern Religion Stephen Asma finds striking similarities between "green living" and traditional religion: orthodoxy (recycling, using paper or cloth grocery bags), spiritual practice (reducing one's carbon footprint), sin (plastic grocery bags, driving an SUV), enemy infidels (oil company execs, anti-regulation politicians), a coming apocalypse (climate change), high priests and prophets (the "Goracle"), and so on.

Chronicle of Higher Education 01/10/10

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Was Barthes's 'Death Of The Author' A Sort Of Deicide? "In France, perhaps more than anywhere else, the secularisation of society (compounded by the Republic's struggle against the Roman Catholic Church) had led to the adoption of art and literature as substitute religions. Nietzsche had announced the death of God only to see Him replaced by the 'Author-God'. Enter Roland Barthes."

The Guardian (UK) 01/13/10

email this story | Posted 01/14/10@09:44PM

Flattery Will, In Fact, Get You Somewhere "Most people tend to not appreciate flattery accompanied by obvious ulterior motives, and consider themselves fairly adept at determining whose compliments are sincere and whose are BS." But what if flattery works nonetheless, even on the skeptical? Studies are finding that it does. (Except, of course, on the sophisticated readers of ArtsJournal.)

Scientific American 01/12/10

email this story | Posted 01/13/10@10:17PM

'Vancouverism': Engineering An Ecotopia "To a degree probably unmatched anywhere else in North America, the city of Vancouver has tried to impose notions of sustainability in its decisions on what, where and how to build. The result has come to be known as 'Vancouverism,' an urban motif of public transit instead of freeways, a low-carbon energy infrastructure and gleaming high-rise condominium towers in sunlit, walkable neighborhoods laced with urban parks."

Los Angeles Times 01/12/10

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'Digital Maoism': Does Information Really Want To Be Free? An unhealthy social contract has developed on the Web, says Jaron Lanier, one in which "authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the [online] hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

New York Times 01/12/10

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Does A Snappy Name Diminish A New Idea? Probably. "A clever title makes a work easier to recall, and research has linked that sense of ease with feelings of favorability. … [But] people usually invest effort to understand important information, but also mistakenly infer the reverse - namely, that information that requires effort to be understood is important."

Miller-McCune 01/11/10

email this story | Posted 01/12/10@09:51PM