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Not All Mind Wandering Is Created Equal
Mind wandering—sometimes seen as daydreaming or “zoning out”—has been shown to facilitate creative thinking and problem solving, but in the wrong context it can become distracting or even dangerous. Inattentive students can get behind in class, and drivers who aren’t paying attention to the road are far more likely to end up in accidents. And for some professions, like surgeons or air traffic controllers, zoning out on the job can lead to disaster.
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Handling Money Appears to Sway Helpfulness
The cold touch of a nickel may be enough to keep people from helping each other, new research suggests. In a new set of experiments in Poland, a team of researchers found that priming children with money by having them sort coins into their different denominations, as opposed to sorting different colored buttons, influenced how they behaved afterward when tasked with helping experimenters gather crayons. The children who handled money helped the experimenters significantly less than the children who sorted buttons.
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Greenery (or Even Photos of Trees) Can Make Us Happier
The New York Times: A growing body of research shows that people who spend time outside in sunny, green and natural spaces tend to be happier and healthier than those who don’t. A study from Stanford last year, for example, found that young adults who walked for an hour through campus parkland were less anxious afterward and performed better on a test of working memory than if they had strolled along a busy street. Precisely what is going on inside our bodies as we move through the greenery is largely unknown, however.
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Safety in numbers. . . of conservatives
The Boston Globe: REMEMBER THE EBOLA scare back in 2014? Remember the shellacking that Democrats received in the 2014 election? Coincidence? A new study thinks not. Polls indicated increasing support for Republican candidates — particularly in Republican-leaning states — after the outbreak reached the United States and as Google search activity for “Ebola” increased, even though there had been a trend towards Democrats before then and even controlling for the stock market and search activity for “ISIS.” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Liberals and Conservatives Solve Problems Differently
Pacific Standard: The first recorded "Eureka!" moment is widely attributed to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, who supposedly solved a perplexing problem while relaxing in the bath. If the possibly apocryphal story accurately reflects his problem-solving methodology, it gives us a good clue regarding his political beliefs. ... Research teams led by Carola Salvi of Northwestern University have recently published two papers on the topic of how humans faced with problems arrive at solutions.
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Parrots Are a Lot More Than ‘Pretty Bird’
The New York Times: Juan F. Masello never intended to study wild parrots. Twenty years ago, as a graduate student visiting the northernmost province of Patagonia in Argentina, he planned to write his dissertation on colony formation among seabirds. But when he asked around for flocks of, say, cormorants or storm petrels, a park warden told him he was out of luck. “He said, ‘This is the only part of Patagonia with no seabird colonies,’” recalled Dr. Masello, a principal investigator in animal ecology and systematics at Justus Liebig University in Germany. Might the young scientist be interested in seeing a large colony of parrots instead? The sight that greeted Dr.
