5 tricks for improving how you communicate:
bsp; Here's a good trick for dodging questions you don't want to answer. There's a right and a wrong way to brag. "I don't mean to sound arrogant, but..." No, personal disclaimers don't work. Name-dropping doesn't work either. Swearing can reduce pain and make you more persuasive. Sarcasm can make you more creative. Gesturing makes you a better communicator and speaking quickly makes you more persuasive. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
1 min read
5 things you need to know about foreign languages:
u can improve your ability to comprehend someone with a heavy accent by imitating the way they speak. You can tell the language of the mother from listening to her baby cry. Bilinguals are more creative. Also, there's a downside to being bilingual. We cut non-native speakers a lot of slack but we're less likely to trust them. "An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound…
1 min read
Does country music make you want to kill yourself?
's very likely: "The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate." Meanwhile, rock music doesn't lead to suicide and metalheads are actually more mentally heathy than most. It's those people who like opera that you need to look out for. What else do we know about suicide? Ironically, the happiest places have the highest suicide rates. Living at a high altitude…
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Who has time to read books these days?
you don't have time to read, you may want to review some of the notes I've recently posted from excellent books: Dan Ariely's Upside of Irrationality. Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. Sun Tzu's The Art of War. John Medina's Brain Rules. Dan Pink's Drive. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
1 min read
Can you tell a conservative from a liberal by looking at their bedrooms?
nservatives' bedroom had the markers of conscientiousness. Liberals' bedrooms displayed openness. Examples that would make Sherlock Holmes proud are below. Via Sam Gosling's book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. But our findings linking openness and conscientiousness to political attitudes told us we might also find differences in their living spaces. Sure enough, conservatives’ rooms tended to include more organizational items, including calendars and postage stamps. They also contained more conventional decorations and items, including sports paraphernalia, flags of various…
1 min read
Can you tell how smart someone is just by looking at them?
pends on how old they are: People were better than chance at determining how smart kids were. They were slightly more accurate than chance with adults. No more accurate than chance with teens and the elderly. The abstract: The authors investigated accuracy of judging intelligence from facial photos of strangers across the lifespan, facial qualities contributing to accuracy, and developmental paths producing correlations between facial qualities and IQ scores. Judgments were more accurate than chance in childhood and puberty, marginally…
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What’s true of most every man who ends up in the hospital after a fight?
bsp; They probably aren't very intelligent. Smart guys don't get in many fights: OBJECTIVE: To examine the association between low intelligence (IQ) and increased risk of assault. Previous studies have been relatively small, have not adjust for socioeconomic status, and have not examined method-specific assaults. METHODS: Cox proportional hazards regression was used to explore IQ associations with assault by any means and by four specific methods in a large prospective cohort of 1,120,988 Swedish men. Study members had IQ measured…
2 minutes
Which countries are happiest?
a Fast Company: Indonesia, India Mexico, and Brazil lead the pack in happiness, while Russia, South Korea, and Hungary are all pretty miserable (see the chart). There are other factors as well: People who are under 25 are most likely to say they’re "very happy"; Latin American countries as a whole have the most "very happy" people; and people with high income and extensive education are also most likely to report being "very happy." Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly…
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