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Which Way You Lean—Physically—Affects Your Decision-Making
We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. “Decision making, like other cognitive processes, is an integration of multiple sources of information—memory, visual imagery, and bodily information, like posture,” says Anita Eerland, a psychologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages.
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Life’s Extremes: Math vs. Language
LiveScience: Do you know what "abecedarian" means? What about the solution to 250 x 11? Most people would agree they are better at verbal or math subjects in school, as grades usually do attest. Highly intelligent individuals often do well in both subjects, and may know the answers to both questions above, lickety-split, while less intelligent people can struggle. But a minority of us excels in the language department and bombs at mathematics, or vice versa. (As an adjective, abecedarian refers to something relating to the alphabet; 2,750 is the solution to the equation.) These extremes in ability speak (or equate) to the very makeup of our brains.
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NIH-Funded Study Finds Dyslexia not Tied to IQ
International Business Times: Research on brain activity fails to support widely used approach to identify dyslexic students Regardless of high or low overall scores on an IQ test, children with dyslexia show similar patterns of brain activity, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results call into question the discrepancy model - the practice of classifying a child as dyslexic on the basis of a lag between reading ability and overall IQ scores. In many school systems, the discrepancy model is the criterion for determining whether a child will be provided with specialized reading instruction.
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Can romance be reduced to pronouns?
Edmonton Journal: People have struggled for years to figure out what makes a good relationship. Is it common interests? Argument styles? Face shapes? Now, a Texas psychologist says his study shows how pronoun use and mirroring will reveal whether a romance will work out, the New York Times reports in its Love Well blog. Behavioural scientists have long known that humans have a tendency to subconsciously mimic the sounds, style and movement of others. James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, asked 187 students to take part in several four-minute speed dates.
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The psychology of happiness
WXVT CBS: Everyone wants to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is such a basic human drive that the Founding Fathers included it in the Declaration of Independence. Researchers have found that there are real benefits to being happy. Happiness leads to: Better health and longer life Better relationships Greater success at work More ethical behavior The problem is, people aren't very good at predicting what will make them happy. Winning the lottery doesn't do it. After the excitement wears off, lottery winners are no happier than non-winners. Wealth isn't the key. Once you have enough money to take care of your needs, having more won't make you much happier.
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What the Brain Sees After the Eye Stops Looking
When we gaze at a shape and then the shape disappears, a strange thing happens: We see an afterimage in the complementary color. Now a Japanese study has observed for the first time an equally strange illusion: The afterimage appears in a “complementary” shape—circles as hexagons, and vice-versa. “The finding suggests that the afterimage is formed in the brain, not in the eye,” the author, Hiroyuki Ito of Kyushu University, wrote in an email. More specifically, the illusion is produced in the brain’s shape-processing visual cortex, not the eye’s light-receiving, message-sending retina.
