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How to Save More Money: It’s a Matter of Time
The Huffington Post: Americans are living precarious lives. Nearly half of all families -- many with homes and cars and jobs -- are one misfortune away from financial disaster. A medical emergency or even a temporary loss of employment could gobble up their meager savings in six months or less. One in four Americans has zero savings. Many of these people are approaching retirement age, but they will never be able to retire the way they once imagined. There are many reasons for this dire financial situation, but one important one is that Americans simply don't put enough money aside.
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Want To Feel 5 Years Older? Just Take A Memory Test
NPR: Researchers in a memory lab at Texas A&M University noticed that all the older people coming in as volunteers were really worried about how they'd do. So the scientists decided to measure how taking a memory test affects a person's subjective sense of age. Before the test, the 22 participants felt pretty darned good. Even though their average age was 75, they said they felt about 58. Then they were given a list of 30 nouns, told to study them for two minutes, and then asked to recall as many of them as they could in three minutes. The participants did fine on the memory test.
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Hidden Metaphors Get under Our Skin
Scientific American Mind: Look around. Do you see four walls or an expansive vista? The answer could influence your ability to think creatively. A growing body of research suggests that our sensory experiences can trigger metaphorical thinking, influencing our insights and behavior without us even realizing it. New research reveals ways we might be able to harness these subconscious forces. “If you're actively touching an object with the expectation that it will change your view of a situation, it might not work right away,” explains Joshua Ackerman, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the smoothness study.
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Researchers: We can watch 3-D with only one eye
CNN: Humans can see 3-D images with only one eye, according to new research, suggesting a future in which the technology could become cheaper and more accessible. Simply looking through a small hole is enough to experience 3-D, says Dhanraj Vishwanath, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His research was published in the journal Psychological Science. The 3-D technology that's currently used in movies and other media relies on two visual images, one from each eye, combining in the viewer's brain to produce 3-D's extra layer of depth. But Vishwanath's research suggests that both eyes aren't needed.
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Data-Mining Our Dreams
The New York Times: ARE dreams really meaningful? Virtually every culture throughout history has developed methods to interpret dreams — most notably, in the modern era, the psychoanalytic approach. But today many people assume that this quest has failed. Science, they say, has proved that dreams are just random signals sent from primitive regions of the brain, signifying nothing, and that dream interpretation is a kind of superstition. This conclusion is premature. For many years, researchers (including me) have been using quantitative methods of analysis to study the content of dreams.
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Logging In to the Brain’s Social Network
NPR Science Friday: Does the pain we feel from rejection and loss have the same effect as physical pain? How does our brain respond to social interactions? In his new book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman describes the biology behind how our brains engage with the social world. Read the whole story: NPR Science Friday
