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Why You (And Everyone You Know) Felt Compelled to Share That BuzzFeed Quiz on Facebook
Fortune: Scrolling through the average Facebook feed is often a baffling experience. Why, for instance, did that aunt’s friend decide now was a good time repost an article about Pizzagate? And why, for a hot second a couple years ago, did it seem as if every single friend from college was posting the inexplicably popular BuzzFeed quiz, “What Country Do You Actually Belong In?” While a pair of new studies doesn’t provide answers to these exact questions, they do examine and analyze what goes on in our brains when we decide to share content.
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A 48-Hour Sexual ‘Afterglow’ Helps to Bond Partners Over Time
A study of newlywed couples indicates that partners experience a sexual ‘afterglow’ that lasts for up to two days and is linked with relationship quality over the long term.
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A Behavioral Economist Tries to Fix Email
The Atlantic: Can anything be done to make people happier with their jobs? What can prevent people from overeating? Will people like beer with balsamic vinegar in it just because they’ve been told it contains a “secret ingredient”? These are some of the questions that Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, has studied in his research over the years, which spans in scope from the weighty to the quotidian.
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Teenagers Do Dumb Things, but There Are Ways to Limit Recklessness
The New York Times: By now parents are familiar with the worrisome finding that the thrill-seeking centers of the adolescent brain can readily outmatch the teenage brain’s emerging rational control systems. I count myself among the adults who find this neurological account of adolescent recklessness to be both clarifying and confounding. It helpfully explains why really thoughtful teenagers sometimes do really dumb things. But experience tells us that some teenagers are much more impulsive than others, so it’s hard to imagine that all adolescents are equally at the mercy of their own gawky brains. New research sheds light on the question of teenagers and self-control.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring suppression of competing memories in substance-related and addictive disorders and etiology of triarchic psychopathy dimensions in chimpanzees.
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How Brain Scientists Forgot That Brains Have Owners
The Atlantic: It’s a good time to be interested in the brain. Neuroscientists can now turn neurons on or off with just a flash of light, allowing them to manipulate the behavior of animals with exceptional precision. They can turn brains transparent and seed them with glowing molecules to divine their structure. They can record the activity of huge numbers of neurons at once. And those are just the tools that currently exist. In 2013, Barack Obama launched the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—a $115 million plan to develop even better technologies for understanding the enigmatic gray blobs that sit inside our skulls.
