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Why Aren’t We Smarter Already? Evolutionary Limits on Cognition
We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems. The authors looked to evolution to understand about why humans are only as smart as we are and not any smarter.
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How Impatience Kills Your Credit Score
Forbes: Everything seems to come back to marshmallows in the end. You may recall the famous 1972 Stanford psychology study, conducted by Walter Mischel, in which a group of kids were presented with a plate of marshmallows and told that if they could wait and not eat them now, they’d get a better reward later. When the adults left the room, some of the kids stuffed marshmallows into their mouths with abandon, while others fought back the urge and waited it out.
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Study: Vaccines & Hand-Washing Can Reduce Prejudice Against Immigrants, the Obese & Crack Addicts
Discover Magazine: The war between people and disease-causing pathogens is old as humanity itself. This has helped shaped our so-called behavioral immunity, which can lead us, for example, to automatically avoid people who are visibly sick. But it can also misfire; previous studies have shown that people with compromised immune systems (due to a recent illness), and even people who describe themselves as afraid of germs or susceptible to disease, are more likely to avoid and feel prejudiced toward otherwise healthy people who merely look different than them, like foreigners or immigrants.
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Waking up to caffeine
Chicago Tribune: A few years ago, when Illinois Institute of Art student Alex Smyth was a hard-core competitive video gamer, caffeine was the elixir that fueled his all-night Halo rampages. He chugged a dozen energy drinks a day and never felt any ill effects, he said. "I love caffeine," said Smyth, 21, who has since moved on to coffee. "It makes me live." He's far from alone in his affection for the world's most beloved stimulant: In North America alone, some research has concluded, up to 90 percent of adults say they consume caffeine regularly. Yet for centuries, it has been occasionally attacked as an unhealthy — even immoral — substance. Read the whole story: Chicago Tribune
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The perfect gift
The Boston Globe: The high season of gifts is now upon us, and it is time to face a few uncomfortable truths: You do not know what most of the people on your list will actually enjoy. The majority of your gifts will be something of a failure. In fact, your whole concept of what makes a gift thoughtful — of what will be appreciated — is almost certainly wrong. There is, however, good news: You can do better, and it’s not that hard. First, though, consider the evidence of our gifting flops. When polled, almost half of all Americans predict they will be disappointed enough to return a holiday gift, and perhaps several.
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Atmospheric Disturbances: On Michael Gazzaniga
The Nation: We live in the age of the fMRI machine, dazzled and bamboozled by pictures of brains “lighting up” in living Technicolor. Before these neuroscientific glory days, the mysteries of the mind had to be approached by rather less alluring methods: postmortem examination of the brains of psychiatric patients, animal experiments of legendary cruelty and intelligence testing after pioneering brain surgeries, to name but a few. During the knife-happy decades of the mid-twentieth century, surgical treatments for seizure disorders generated especially startling insights into human brain function.
