Tag: mind
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This paper, published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, introduces a new term to neuroscience: The FBN, or "Facebook number." Your Facebook number is, of course, your total of friends on the social network. According to Ryota Kanai and co-authors, the higher your Facebook ... Read More
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Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips in their grocery bags than were people who paid with cash. (So if you want to lose weight, use cash!) I tell this ... Read More
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What did you do, really, when Irene struck? As you listen to people tell tales that make them sound more threatened, more casual-cool or more heroic than they really were, you might think: Wouldn't it be great if you could just push a button and make them incapable, or at least less capable, of ... Read More
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In the past few years, various Bigfoot media have caught up with what scientists think about the mind. Friday, for example, David Brooks described what was wrong with Samuel Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations." Which is, as I wrote in 2005, that human beings don't have a single ... Read More
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In a technology-based culture, you learn from infancy that truth is what can be counted and measured. That makes it easy to divide any conversation into what you learned (important!) and how you learned it (immaterial). What your medical tests reveal is vital; how your doctor tells you, her ... Read More
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Psi is psychology's equivalent of the perpetual motion machine in physics. Claims in favor of telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions or other extra-sensory perceptions were always considered the realm of looney-tunes who write to professors with no margins and lots of fanciful diagrams. Or worse ... Read More
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About 50,000 years ago, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Spain, somebody (or bodies) was keeping carefully ground-up pigments--red, yellow, orange and shiny black--in neatly pierced seashells. That's evidence, says this paper, that these people wore cosmetics, which means it's evidence of ... Read More
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Footnote about the Pinker-Gladwell kerfuffle: To discredit Gladwell, Pinker takes advantage of a truly embarrassing mistake (the science-writer's nightmare) in which Gladwell misspelled "eigenvalue'' as "igon value.'' (It seems a less successful gambit, though, after you learn that Pinker ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male