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Is Your Left Hand More Motivated Than Your Right?
Motivation doesn't have to be conscious; your brain can decide how much it wants something without input from your conscious mind. Now a new study shows that both halves of your brain don't even have to agree. Motivation can happen in one side of the brain at a time. Psychologists used to think that motivation was a conscious process. You know you want something, so you try to get it. But a few years ago, Mathias Pessiglione, of the Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, and his colleagues showed that motivation could be subconscious; when people saw subliminal pictures of a reward, even if they didn't know what they'd seen, they would try harder for a bigger reward.
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Reading the Look of Love
How fast you can judge whether a person of the opposite sex is looking at you depends on how masculine or feminine they look, according to a new study. The researchers speculate that there may be an evolutionary advantage to quickly noticing when a hottie is looking at you. Psychologists have debated how we determine whether someone else is looking at us or not. One point of view is that "it's almost a geometric problem," says Benedict C. Jones, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland – that people just look at the whites of the eyes and other features of the face, without being influenced by the face in general.
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Tool Manipulation is Represented Similary in the Brains of the Blind and the Sighted
Blind people think about manipulating tools in the same regions of the brain as do people who can see, according to a new study. The researchers say this adds to evidence that the brain has a fairly defined organization, while still being able to adapt to unusual conditions, such as not having any vision. When you look at a glass in front of you on the desk, it sets off a lot of reactions in your brain. Part of your brain categorizes it: "That's a glass!" Another part of the brain thinks about the glass's shape and size, its exact location, and what you would have to do with your hand and arm if you were going to reach out and grab it.
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Brain Structure Corresponds to Personality
Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior. Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain.
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Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It?
Bloomberg: Everyone applauds innovation. At least, they love it in retrospect, after it has worked. Before that, it's just somebody's wild idea that competes with every other wild idea for resources and support. What sounds great in the abstract seems risky when translated to a specific unproven idea. For that reason, executives who tell me that they want more innovation sometimes ask, as their first question, "Who else is doing it?" Or they say, "We want more innovation; we just don't want to be the first." I hate to point out the irony to them. Guys, innovation means maybe no one else is doing it. You might have to be the first. And that might be a good thing.
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A Taste for Controversy
Science: Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, has helped lead the movement to study subjective experience, long considered off-limits. That leadership has paid off in many high-profile publications, election to the National Academy of Sciences, and last year, the presidency of the Association for Psychological Science. Her career hasn't come without controversy, however. The concept of supertasters still ignites debate. And Bartoshuk is making waves again. Her latest passion is nothing short of overturning one of the central methods of her entire field, the subjective scales on which generations of psychologists have built their careers.