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Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses
NPR: There are times when I've thought about singing during the program or maybe telling a bad joke. I'm getting the feeling this morning that our producer and editor, Rachel Ward and Kenya Young, would shoot me down. You ever have this experience? Pitch what you think is a brilliantly creative idea and your boss or manager says nope. If so, it might be worth listening to Steve Inskeep's conversation with NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. Shankar's found some research explaining why good ideas get rejected. ...
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What Faces Can’t Tell Us
The New York Times: CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face? It sure seems like it. In everyday life, you can often “read” what someone is feeling with the quickest of glances. Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments, from fear and anger to joy and surprise. Increasingly, companies like Apple and government agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are banking on this transparency, developing software to identify consumers’ moods or training programs to gauge the intent of airline passengers.
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When We Use Fate As A Scapegoat
The Huffington Post: Making decisions can be difficult, and making a hard decision can up the stress even more. A new study suggests that when we have an especially hard decision to make, we're more likely to use the belief in fate as a coping mechanism. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that believing that outcomes are out of our control is a coping mechanism to help us live with our decisions. Researchers from Duke University conducted two experiments to analyze the relationship between decision making and belief in fate. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian
The Atlantic: Immediately after 9/11, comedy ground to a halt. The Daily Show went off the air for nine days. Saturday Night Live, whose 27th season started 18 days later, featured a somber cold-open with Lorne Michaels asking New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, "Can we be funny?" The staffers of The Onion, the satirical paper that had just relocated to New York, weren’t sure how to answer that question. Even three weeks after the attack, the comedian Gilbert Gottfried was publicly hissed at for joking that he was taking a flight that would make a stop at the Empire State Building. ... The Onion’s triumph reflects McGraw’s long-held theory that comedy is equal parts darkness and light.
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Reporter turns in article about procrastination on time
PBS: While writing this article, I have engaged in the following activities: checked Facebook more than 35 times, watched 10 totally unrelated YouTube clips and browsed BuzzFeed. And I can’t even count the number of times I opened my email. In other words, I procrastinated on a story about procrastination. What was behind these overwhelming urges to do anything but write this story? And how much control did I have over my procrastination? Was I hardwired to put things off until the last minute? We all procrastinate. We delay things we know we shouldn’t — then scramble to get them done.
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Open-Sourcing a Treatment for Cancer
The New Yorker: Elana Simon was given a diagnosis of a rare form of liver cancer at the age of twelve. Six years later, a few months shy of her high-school graduation, she is not only a survivor but a certified cancer researcher: today, she published an article about her disease, fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, in Science, one of the world’s most important scientific journals. One of the unique issues that Simon and others with extremely rare illnesses face is that there’s often not enough data to know exactly how to treat them.
