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The Brain Trainers
The New York Times: In the back room of a suburban storefront previously occupied by a yoga studio, Nick Vecchiarello, a 16-year-old from Glen Ridge, N.J., sits at a desk across from Kathryn Duch, a recent college graduate who wears a black shirt emblazoned with the words “Brain Trainer.” Spread out on the desk are a dozen playing cards showing symbols of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Nick stares down, searching for three cards whose symbols match. “Do you see it?” Ms. Duch asks encouragingly. “Oh, man,” mutters Nick, his eyes shifting among the cards, looking for patterns. Across the room, Nathan Veloric, 23, studies a list of numbers, looking for any two in a row that add up to nine.
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Guilty Gift-Giving
The Washington Post: If it’s the thought that counts when giving gifts, why do so many of us get so stressed during the holidays? It’s because you often feel guilty for not giving more even if you can’t afford it. “There’s a lot of guilt and social comparison in holiday shopping,” psychology professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst told Karen Cheney of Money Magazine. Cheney says: “Want to beat your psychology and that post-holiday hangover? Simply use these strategies to get the names crossed off your list -- without crossing into the red.” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Facebook, Email More Irresistible Than Sex
ABC: You may want to ask your date to turn off his or her phone. A new study suggests Facebook and email trump sex in terms of sheer irresistibility. The German study used smartphone-based surveys to probe the daily desires of 205 men and women, most of whom were college age. For one week the phones, provided by the researchers, buzzed seven times daily, alerting study subjects to take a quick survey on the type, strength and timing of their desires, as well as their ability to resist them.
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Self-Imagination Can Enhance Memory in Healthy and Memory-Impaired Individuals
There’s no question that our ability to remember informs our sense of self. Now research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provides new evidence that the relationship may also work the other way around: Invoking our sense of self can influence what we are able to remember. Research has shown that self-imagination – imagining something from a personal perspective – can be an effective strategy for helping us to recognize something we’ve seen before or retrieve specific information on cue.
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Visualizing Vastness
The New York Times: In the funky, crunchy, slightly gritty college town where I live, we have a pedestrian mall called the Ithaca Commons. You can probably picture it: A gem store. A hemp shop. Lots of places to buy hand-made candles. And a scale model of the solar system … five billion times smaller than the real thing. Built in honor of Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, author and science communicator, the Sagan Planet Walk offers lessons that reach far beyond astronomy. It’s a case study in visualizing vastness. Admit it. You have no real feeling for the size of the solar system. That’s O.K. Nobody else does either. Even knowing the numbers doesn’t help much.
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Behavioral economics taps power of persuasion for tax compliance
Chicago Tribune: Can peer pressure make delinquent taxpayers pony up what they owe the government? Behavioral economists say it can, and some tax agencies in both the United States and Britain are taking their advice to heart -- and finding that they are reaping rewards. Behavioral economics has already upended investing and finance with new theories on why and how people make decisions about their money. From the simple re-wording of late notices to changing the structure of back-tax payment plans, tax collectors are getting results by tapping into basic human tendencies.
