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Sorry, Ritalin’s not going to make you smart
The Toronto Star: Popping pills won’t boost your brainpower if you have average or above-average intelligence, according to a new paper published by the Association for Psychological Science. “Are you going to be able to manipulate your physiology to make yourself smarter? Chances are, you’re not going to be able to,” Thomas Hills, a psychology professor at the U.K.-based University of Warwick, told the Star. “Evolution’s already created the best possible physiological environment for you if you don’t have a deficit.” And humans likely won’t get any smarter, according to the paper’s findings.
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Sound and vision work hand in hand, UCLA psychologists report
UCLA: Our senses of sight and hearing work closely together, perhaps more than people realize, a new UCLA psychology study shows. "If we think of the perceptual system as a democracy where each sense is like a person casting a vote and all votes are counted to reach a decision — although not all votes are counted equally — what our study shows is that the voters talk to one another and influence one another even before each casts a vote," said Ladan Shams, a UCLA associate professor of psychology and the senior author of the new study.
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Stressed About Final Exams? Try Self-Compassion
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Elizabeth A. Hendriks from the University of Notre Dame present her poster session research, “Self-Compassion Buffers Negative Affect but Does Not Moderate Cortisol Following Social Stress Task.” Hendriks and her collaborator Michelle M. Wirth measured self compassion, negative affect, and cortisol in study participants who were asked to deliver a persuasive speech to a panel of trained judges. They found that participants who displayed high self-compassion experienced less negative affect than those who displayed low self-compassion.
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Ritalin and Other Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs Probably Won’t Make You Smarter
Scientific American: On Monday, I put up a post on whether we would ever be able to upload our brains into a computer, merging ourselves into the great digital Singularity that would provide us with eternal life—and virtually infinite sensory powers and intelligence. The take home: This is akin to a cargo cult-like religion. Don’t hold your breath (or freeze your brain) in anticipation.
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Impatient? It Could Be The Reason Your Credit Score Stinks
Business Insider: Those who exert more patience and are willing to wait for larger financial payouts down the line have credit scores an average of 30 points higher than those who are less patient, according to a study to be published in the journal Psychological Science next month. Time Moneyland's Martha White reports that Stephan Meier and Charles Sprenger, professors at Columbia and Stanford, respectively, found that people who need instant gratification are also more likely to pay their credit cards late or skip a payment altogether. Impatient consumers want to feel the immediate benefit of cash in the bank, which outweighs the benefit of not paying interest or late fees.
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What Surveys Don’t Know About You
The Wall Street Journal: Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture riffs today on how meaningless he finds the National Retail Federation surveys of how much consumers expect to spend at holiday time. His table of year-over-year changes in expected vs. actual spending is an eye-opener. The same phenomenon has been documented by social scientists for decades: People are almost freakishly inept at forecasting their future behavior. That’s largely because you predict your future behavior by assessing how you feel now about a decision you won’t be making for some time to come. Your assessment of how you think you will feel in the future depends very largely on how you feel in the present.
