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Meditation may help reduce smoking, study says
Los Angeles Times: Meditating just a modest amount may help curb cigarette smoking, even in smokers who don’t intend to quit, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After a few hours of meditation, smokers puffed significantly less and had increased activity in brain regions associated with self-control — without even knowing that their behavior had changed. Researchers from several institutions recruited 60 college students, including 27 smokers. Half the subjects learned a form of meditation called integrative body-mind training, or IBMT, practicing for five hours over a two-week period.
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When a Relationship Becomes a Game
The Atlantic: It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Kamakshi Zeidler, a 34-year-old plastic surgeon in Los Gatos, California, is explaining how to fill up a “love tank.” “If you do little things for your partner... you get signals your love tank is full. And if you don’t, you’ll get signals that your love tank is almost empty. It’s based on how much you love each other. Well, through the app,” she adds. Zeidler and her husband Brendon form a satisfied, if busy, pair. Both work long hours and have little time for spontaneous romantic gestures. The “love tank” Kamakshi describes is one feature of a “couples’ app” called Kahnoodle. ... By many measures, the app should work.
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Study: Messy desks get creative juices flowing
Minnesota Public Radio: New research shows that the decisions you make and your creativity are influenced by the relative neatness of your workspace. Kathleen Vohs, a psychological scientist and professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota said the subject first got her attention after she moved to another building during her work on her PhD. Vohs said the change of location to new, modern office space, seemed to prompt changes in her test subjects. She researched the phenomenon and found that desk tidiness affects work.
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Time to Put Humor Under the Microscope
The Huffington Post: According to Dennett, humor evolved as a way for the mind to incentivize the discovery of mistaken leaps to conclusion -- or as he puts in his talk, it's "A neural system wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job." This so-called "Hurley model" (named after lead author Matthew Hurley), makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. ... That's why when Pete, the scholarly half of our duo, began wondering what makes things funny, he launched the Humor Research Lab, aka HuRL.
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Spoiler Alert: Spoilers May Not Be That Bad
NPR: When you check social media and you're not caught up on your favorite TV show, say, you never know when you might encounter a spoiler. Somebody on Twitter, some blog says too much about what happened in a plot line. My big spoiler moment came when I saw a post about a death on "Downton Abbey" and I thought that everything was just ruined. But is it really that bad when this happens? ... Spoilers have become enough of a preoccupation for a university to study them. Psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld is at the University of California, San Diego. He examined what effect spoilers have on people's enjoyment of stories. Read the whole story: NPR
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Does having a neat or sloppy desk influence the way you think?
Fox News: There seem to be two types of people in the world: those who keep their desks neat and those who don’t. Now, new research shows that whether your desk is messy or tidy may influence how you think. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found that working at a clean and tidy desk promotes socially acceptable behaviors, like generosity and healthy eating, whereas working at a sloppy desk promotes out-of the-box thinking and an openness to new ideas.
