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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.
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Your Broker Is Probably a Master of Illusion
U.S. News & World Report: Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-born psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2002. He is best known for his work in behavioral economics, which attempts to explain how investors make decisions. In a thoughtful article adapted from his upcoming book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman makes some interesting observations.
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Video gaming children ‘more creative’
The Telegraph: Researchers at Michigan State University, in the United States, found that playing video games was linked to greater creativity, regardless of the type of game played. Linda Jackson, the professor of psychology at Michigan State who led the research, said that the findings should encourage game designers to try to discover what it is about video games that stimulates creativity. She said: "Once they do that, video games can be designed to optimize the development of creativity while retaining their entertainment values such that a new generation of video games will blur the distinction between education and entertainment." Read the whole story: The Telegraph
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A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain
Scientific American: Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished.
