What makes you unique?
m happy to announce the results of a little side project I've been working on for a few months now. I review the analytics of this site daily and by cross-indexing that data with the findings of over 100 different behavior studies I've been able to put together a personality profile of what the average reader of this blog is like and what makes you guys unique. This should be approximately 85.2% accurate. Please give it a read and think…
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Does depression make women more or less interested in sex?
re: Depression is pervasive in the US particularly among women. The costs in terms of direct medical costs and forgone earnings are substantial. This paper investigates an additional cost of depression. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, we use a unique instrument, the attacks of September 11, which have been linked to depression, to identify the effect of depression on risky sexual behaviors. We find that depressed women are more likely to be sexually active, to…
1 min read
When is being smart a disadvantage?
recent posted how smarter people are more likely to "choke" under pressure. Seems there may be other disadvantages to being "too" smart. People high in working memory may have a harder time "thinking outside the box": Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To: People’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brainpower. This seems to be even…
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What can we learn about peak performance from reading George Orwell?
ublethink might be more than a term Orwell coined in his novel 1984. It might also be the way top performers combine the best training with the best execution. Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success: So what Gallwey is really saying is that a successful golfer must attempt to create subjective certainty in his own mind that he will make the putt while simultaneously playing it at such a pace that acknowledges the possibility he…
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What makes a song, a book or a movie a hit?
ose top ten lists have more power than you ever guessed. "...whether or not a song became a “hit” was determined solely by whether it was perceived as already being popular... whatever gains an early advantage in popularity will win." Via Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy: An intriguing study published in the journal Science shows just how well this can work. The researchers invited twenty-seven teenagers to visit a Web site where…
2 minutes
When do we stop being interested in new things? What can this teach us about happiness?
a Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy: In an attempt to understand why he was musically stuck in the seventies, Sapolsky set out to study “the windows in which we form our cultural tastes, and [in which we] are amenable to new experiences.” Was there, he wondered, an age at which these “windows of openness slammed shut?” Indeed, Sapolsky concluded, there was. He and his research assistants called radio stations that specialize radio…
3 minutes
Are dangerous men more attractive men?
bsp; Single women had their brains scanned as they looked at photos of men. The pictures had been subtlely altered to make the men's faces more or less masculine. The more masculine faces won out in terms of attraction -- but the areas of the brain that were activated indicated these faces were also ones the women found most threatening. Via Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships: The group found a few interesting results. First, compared…
1 min read
Are the smartest people the most likely to fail under pressure?
s. Smarter people are more likely to use their cognitive horsepower to find the right answers while the sub-brilliant rely on shortcuts. When the pressure is on, it becomes very hard to brute force solutions and bright people have to switch to shortcuts. Much is lost in the transition. People with less working memory panic but don't suffer the performance decrease because they rely on shortcuts from the beginning. Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting…
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