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Young Men, Frequent Drivers Most Likely To Get Distracted While Driving
If you're reading this on your phone while driving, stop it. Especially if you're a young neurotic extroverted guy who drives a lot. Two seconds of attention to the insistent beeping and blinking of our mobile phones or simply changing the radio station accounts for at least 12 percent of car accidents worldwide and 14 percent of them in the U.S., according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. While anyone can get distracted behind the wheel, some people may be more prone than others, according to a study published Friday in Frontiers in Psychology by Ole Johansson, a researcher at Norway's Institute of Transport Economics.
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Pioneering Brain Scientist Still Working at 99
You're a preeminent neuroscientist, and a professor at Canada's prestigious McGill University. At age 99, what motivates you to keep up your research at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital? I am very curious. Human quirks attract my interest. If you're a theoretical person, you can sit and dream up beautiful theories, but my approach is, What would happen if or, Why is this person doing [that] and then, How can I measure it? I wouldn't still be working if I didn't find it exciting. ... Are you curious in real life, too? Yes. I'm a good "noticer" of behavior as much as the kind of furniture people have!
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Don’t Know What the Angular Gyrus Is? Your Heart Does
“For years, science has relegated our love to this basic instinct, almost like an addiction that has no redeeming value.” These are not the words of some New Age evangelist preaching from the mount at a couples retreat in Arizona but of Stephanie Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago who has spent much of her career mapping the dynamics of love in the brain. Her research and some of the theories she has developed put her at odds with other scientists who have described romantic love as an emotion, a primitive drive, even a drug. Using neuroimaging, Dr.
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Do You Have Charisma?
We’re used to thinking of charisma as indefinable. It has been called alchemy, or a mysterious gift. But maybe charisma isn’t such a mystery, after all. According a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers from the University of Toronto have developed a scientific measure of charisma that they say is a simple, accurate way to figure out if you have it. ...
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The Psychology of Giving Human Names to Your Stuff
According to a 2013 poll from the insurance company Nationwide, around 25 percent of car owners have named their ride. Granted, the survey isn’t exactly scientific, but while the statistic may not be a perfect reflection of reality, it does align with something you may have already seen in the wild: Plenty of people like to name the appliances in their lives — cars, laptops, bikes. Maybe you know someone who does it. Maybe it’s you! ... “We think there are multiple reasons why this happens,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
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Why written languages look alike the world over
What do Cyrillic, Arabic, Sanskrit, and 113 other writing systems have in common? Different as they appear at first glance, they share basic structural features, according to a new study: characters with vertical symmetry (like the Roman letters A and T) and a preference for vertical and horizontal lines over oblique lines (like those in the letters X and W). The explanation appears to be rooted in the wiring of our brain. “People appear to have an aesthetic preference for certain kinds of shapes and designs, and that preference seems to explain the writing systems we see,” says Julie Fiez, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.
