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What Cocktail Parties Teach Us
The Wall Street Journal: You're at a party. Music is playing. Glasses are clinking. Dozens of conversations are driving up the decibel level. Yet amid all those distractions, you can zero in on the one conversation you want to hear. This ability to hyper-focus on one stream of sound amid a cacophony of others is what researchers call the "cocktail-party effect." Now, scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have pinpointed where that sound-editing process occurs in the brain—in the auditory cortex just behind the ear, not in areas of higher thought.
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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational
Wired: To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study. “It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic.
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Small “Neural Focus Groups” Predict Anti-Smoking Ad Campaign Success
Brain scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon and the University of California, Los Angeles. The findings are relevant to political advertising, commercial market research, and public health campaigns, and broaden the use of brain imaging from a diagnostic to a predictive tool.
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'Moody' Toddlers More Likely to Become Problem Gamblers, Study Suggests
LiveScience: Restless, moody toddlers are more likely than other tots to grow up to become problem gamblers, suggests a new study. Retracing the lives of more than 900 New Zealanders, researchers found that 3-year-olds with this so-called under-controlled personality were twice as likely as those with well-adjusted temperaments to be compulsive gamblers three decades later. The findings appeared online March 28 in the journal Psychological Science. Wendy Slutske of the University of Missouri and her colleagues reported they examined data from the New Zealand Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.
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Police photo lineups challenged after series of wrongful convictions
Rock Center with Brian Williams: Ruby Session’s guests filed in slowly, clasping each other in warm, familiar embraces. Many, who were there to attend her 75th birthday, shared a harrowing history both with each other and the woman they had come to celebrate. “She didn’t adopt us. We adopted her,” said Christopher Scott, who spent 13 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
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Post-Prozac Nation: The Science and History of Treating Depression
The New York Times: Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac. In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” She floated from one “suicidal reverie” to the next. Yet, just a few weeks after starting Prozac, her life was transformed.