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A Simple Weight Loss Strategy. Really. Maybe.
Dieting and weight control are really pretty simple. We gain weight, and have trouble losing it, because we eat too much and move too little. If we can switch that around, most of us should be able to maintain a sensible weight without resorting to unhealthy gimmicks. But that’s just the biology of weight control. What about the psychology? Why do we habitually take in too many calories, even when we know those calories are a ticket to obesity and all sorts of chronic diseases? There are two major reasons for unhealthy weight, according to experts. One is a simple lack of self-control. We live in a society where every day we confront an abundance of high-calories foods.
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People Don’t Just Think with Their Guts; Logic Plays a Role Too
For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one: “Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.
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Earlier Autism Diagnosis Could Mean Earlier Interventions
WKAR Public Radio: Autism is usually diagnosed in children between the ages of two and three or later, but new research shows that it's possible to find symptoms in much younger children and to diagnose autism at 18 to 24 months. Brooke Ingersoll is an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. She recently wrote a paper on autism published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Ingersoll told WKAR's Gretchen Millich that if children can be diagnosed earlier, it might be possible to prevent them from developing autism. BROOKE INGERSOLL: Autism is a behaviorally-defined disorder. The way you identify it or diagnose it is based on behaviors.
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Why we make bad decisions
Salon: What role do our surroundings have in the choices we make? Consider the fact that we are more likely to commit a “random” act of kindness toward a person who has already done something kind toward us. We are less likely to help someone in serious trouble when we’re in a crowd, or choose different professions based on the sound and spelling of our first names. It turns out the context in which we make our decisions has a huge impact on their outcomes.
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A weird and wonderful world of discovery
Irish Times: HAVE YOU ever read about a piece of health- related research and wondered what on Earth possessed anyone to ask that question in the first place? There’s often method to the seeming madness of the quirkier studies, but it’s fun every so often to sit and gather these gems into one spot and marvel at their bizarre qualities. The Ig Nobel awards is usually a good place to go hunting for oddities – the annual prizes celebrate improbable research that makes you laugh and then think. Read the whole story: Irish Times
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Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pervasiveness of Egocentric Bias: Why We Are All THAT Sort of Bear
Scientific American: This past week, Winnie-the-Pooh just wouldn’t let me go. Please write about me, he kept whining. And when I told him I’d already written about him last week, he just looked confused. So what? Write about me again. He insisted that one time was not nearly enough, that he had far, far more to share with the world—and that, after all, the world would be quite happy to hear far, far more about him. And why is that, I wondered? Here, Christopher Robin stepped in, right out of the first chapter of Winnie the Pooh. “Because he’s that sort of Bear.” Indeed. Solid logic if ever there was.
