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The Ways Food Tricks Our Brains
The Atlantic: In 1998, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a study that might strike you as kind of mean. They took two people with severe amnesia, who couldn’t remember events occurring more than a minute earlier, and fed them lunch. Then a few minutes later, they offered a second lunch. The amnesic patients eagerly ate it. Then a few minutes later, they offered a third lunch, and the patients ate that, too. Days later, they repeated the experiment, telling two people with no short-term memory that it was lunch time over and over and observing them readily eat multiple meals in a short period of time.
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So Much for Your Gut
Inc.: A recent study, led by a Harvard professor and published in the April edition of Psychological Science, found that the ability to discern if others are trustworthy, dominant, and competent just by looking at them is not a skill honed over time and with experience. Read the whole story: Inc.
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Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
The Wall Street Journal: Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?
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Individual Brain Activity Predicts Tendency to Succumb to Daily Temptations
Activity in areas of the brain related to reward and self-control may offer neural markers that predict whether people are likely to resist or give in to temptations, like food.
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Psychological Consequences Of Calling Obesity A Disease
NPR: I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'd like to thank Celeste Headlee for sitting in for me while I was away. On the program today, we are focusing on some interesting health issues that might be on your mind after a week of holiday meals and family gatherings. Later, we will tell you about some interesting new findings about depression in new mothers who are living in multigenerational households. But we're going to start by talking about obesity, which affects 1 in 3 Americans. Last year, you might remember, the American Medical Association, the nation's largest physicians group, classified obesity as a disease.
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The Search for Our Inner Lie Detectors
The New York Times: Is a job applicant lying to you? What about your boss, or an entrepreneur who is promising to double your investment? Most of us are bad at spotting a lie. At least consciously. New research, published last month in Psychological Science, suggests that we have good instincts for judging liars, but that they are so deeply buried that we can’t get at them. This finding is the work of Leanne ten Brinke, a forensic psychologist — she previously studied parents who killed their children and lied about it — who has turned her attention to the business world. “Perhaps our own bodies know better than our conscious minds who is lying,” explained Dr.
