Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The evolution of overconfidence

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Johnson and Fowler on the crucial role of overconfidence in human success: Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide rang...
Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Self-care and finding personal peace in today's socio-political climate.

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In Fort Lauderdale, FL, and now in Austin TX, I have organized discussion groups that meet regularly to discuss new topics and ideas. The Fl...
Monday, October 29, 2018

DNA variants linked to same sex behavior.

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Michael Price and Jocelyn Kaiser report from the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in San Diego: How genes influen...
Friday, October 26, 2018

Diffusion in networks and the virtue of burstiness

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From Akbarpour and Jackson : Significance The contagion of disease and the diffusion of information depend on personal contact. People ...
Thursday, October 25, 2018

Musicians' enhanced auditory perception depends on the instrument they play.

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Professionally trained musicians show enhanced auditory perception of music. Krishnan et al. show that this expertise is modulated by the ...
Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Seeing something that is not there - our brain retroactively constructs our reality.

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Two new illusions found by Stiles et al. (open source) report two new multimodal illusions in which sound influences visual perception. The...
Tuesday, October 23, 2018

An average person can recognize 5,000 faces.

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Jenkins et al. recruited 25 undergraduate or postgraduate students at the University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen (15 female, ...
Monday, October 22, 2018

What is the last question?

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After 20 years, the Edge.org annual question exercise seems to have run out of steam. John Brockman, author of "The Third Culture...
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Friday, October 19, 2018

It's better to be born rich than gifted.

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Andrew Van Dam points to work by Papageorge and Thom use genome based measurements to demonstrate that even though genetic endowments are ...
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Thursday, October 18, 2018

Trump Anxiety Disorder

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John Harris (chief editor of POLITICO ) and Sarah Zimmerman offer an article "Trump May Not Be Crazy, But the Rest of Us Are Getting T...
Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Feeling unsafe in a safe world - the unsafety theory of stress

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Brosschot et al. make the point that our body's stress response is chronically turned on, unless it is actively inhibited by our upstai...
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Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Health of fathers influences the well-being of their progeny.

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Watkins et al. show in mice that a low protein diet during the period of spermatogenesis leads to offspring with disturbed metabolic health...
Monday, October 15, 2018

Too much or too little sleep correlates with cognitive deficits.

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Wild et al. collected sleep and cognitive performance data from ~10,000 people to find that less than 7 or more than 8 hours of sleep a nig...
Friday, October 12, 2018

A new algorithm for predicting disease risk.

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I pass on the text of this piece from Gina Kolata , and then the abstract of the article by Khera et al. she is referencing: By surveying ...
Thursday, October 11, 2018

Digital media and developing minds

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I want to point to the Oct. 2 issue of PNAS , which free online access to a Sackler Colloquium on Digital Media and Developing Minds. The pl...
Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Where is free will in our brains?

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Really fascinating work from Darby et al. identifying the brain areas that make us feel like we have free will, the perception that we are ...
Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Sans Forgetica

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A fascinating piece from Taylor Telford in The Washington Post describes a new font devised by psychology and design researchers at RMIT Un...
Monday, October 08, 2018

In praise of mediocrity

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Tim Wu does an engaging essay on how the pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. I’m a little surpri...
Friday, October 05, 2018

Militarized police forces do not enhance safety or reduce crime, but do diminish police reputation.

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From Jonathan Mummolo : Significance National debates over heavy-handed police tactics, including so-called “militarized” policing, are...
Thursday, October 04, 2018

The number of neurons in the amygdala normally increases during development, but not in autism.

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Avino et al. point out one possible underlying cause of the characteristic difficulty that people with autism spectrum disorder have in und...