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You’ve changed somehow. Is that a new turnip?
I spent about an hour yesterday at the National Gallery of Art, mesmerized by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings of human faces. They are not realistic depictions of faces, though some were meant as portraits of public figures. They are instead composites of familiar objects like flowers, fruit or fish and crustaceans—each rendered with scientific accuracy. Close examination reveals the intricate interplay of these objects, but at first glance they are unmistakably faces, with noses and ears and hair and chins. They are quite surreal, which is remarkable given that Arcimboldo created them in the 16th century. Arcimboldo clearly knew something about how we perceive faces.
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Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A.
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Taste the difference: How our genes, gender and even hormones affect the way we eat
The Independent: Try it, it's delicious!" I often urge my children, bossily. And although I don't say it out loud, I feel equally baffled when adults are really faddy eaters or don't share my adoration of a particularly tasty morsel. It turns out I'm not a food fascist but contrary to popular belief, there is no one version of delicious. Some of us have a far stronger sense of taste than others (not necessarily a good thing) and a host of factors ranging from mood to gender to our sense of hearing (really) can impact heavily on our perception of flavour. Psychologist Linda Bartoshuk and her colleagues first coined the term "supertaster" in the 1990s.
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New Research From Psychological Science
On "Feeling Right" in Cultural Contexts: How Person-Culture Match Affects Self-Esteem and Subjective Well-Being C. Ashley Fulmer, Michele J. Gelfand, Arie W. Kruglanski, Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, Antonio Pierro, and E. Tory Higgins Due to work requirements or as part of educational programs, individuals can find themselves living in cultures very different from their own. How does the interaction of culture with an individual's personality affect their self-esteem and well-being?
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The Mind Uses Syntax to Interpret Actions
Most people are familiar with the concept that sentences have syntax. A verb, a subject, and an object come together in predictable patterns. But actions have syntax, too; when we watch someone else do something, we assemble their actions to mean something, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "There are oceans and oceans of work on how we understand languages and how we interpret the things other people say," says Matthew Botvinick of Princeton University, who cowrote the paper with his colleagues Kachina Allen, Steven Ibara, Amy Seymour, and Natalia Cordova.
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The logic of a psychopath
Before his execution in the Florida electric chair in 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to murdering 30 young women, typically by bludgeoning them to death and often raping them as well. He almost certainly had many more victims than that, perhaps more than 100. But he avoided suspicion for much of his five-year killing spree, in part because he was good-looking and clean-cut, a college grad and a law student. Despite this outward appearance, Bundy was socially clueless. He was introverted and by his own description had no sense of how to get along with people. Near the end of his life he described himself this way: "I didn't know what made things tick.
