Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, [...]

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There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Your morning pages, Julia, are a perfect example of a capturing technique. There are many ways to capture [...]

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Deci tracked a bunch of college students who were solving puzzles for fun. He divided them into two groups. One group was allowed to keep solving puzzles as before. People in the other were offered a small financial reward for each puzzle they solved.
The psychologist later evaluated the volunteers: He found that people given a [...]

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I just found this clever advert for The Economist which has an immediate impact but kinda becomes a bit awkward if you think about it for too long.
Presumably, it’s meant to convey the idea that the magazine is ‘mind expanding’. …
But ‘brain expanding’ is just kind of awkward. It makes me think of hydrocephalus [...]

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Fruit flies typically sleep 12 hours a day. Sehgal and her team studied 3,500 fruit flies and found mutants that survived on little to no sleep – one to two hours a day or none at all. The sleepless flies had a mutation of a gene that Sehgal and her team have named Sleepless. They [...]

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“Negative to Positive” centers around images of Tracy’s brain from that long-ago scan, on which she has etched thoughts she penned back when she was seeking help—such somewhat cryptic observations as, “Throw stuff out there,” or “Every thought gets a new wrinkle.” Mementos, urgings, shadows of life, these black-and-white images underscore the fragility—and potential—of the [...]

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Miller’s research validates and expands upon existing concerns about energy drink consumption: “The principal target demographic for energy drinks is young adults ages 18-25, but they’re nearly as common among younger teens,” she explains. “This is a concern because energy drinks typically contain three times the caffeine of a soft drink, and in some cases, [...]

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If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?
This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.
Would you spend your money tackling diseases like malaria, [...]

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In his article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word ‘the’ was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians.
⇒ Dennett on magic and misdirection (Mind Hacks, via Big Contrarian.)

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A report by scientists from The Netherlands identifies a compound in human saliva that greatly speeds wound healing.
I knew it.
⇒ Licking Your Wounds: Scientists Isolate Compound In Human Saliva That Speeds Wound Healing (Science Daily)

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If there is an innate difference between Yo Yo Ma and a mediocre cellist, or between Tiger Woods and your golfing uncle, it is a willingness to practice, and not an innate aptitude for the cello or the 9 iron. As K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist at Florida State University, wrote in his influential [...]

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Often, we learn about risks and remedies by relying on the media to interpret medical research and other data that purport to tell what is bad (or good) for us.
The incessant dire warnings – about trace chemicals in the water supply, carbon monoxide in our homes, pesticides used in agriculture and even plasticizers in rubber [...]

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ONLINE databases of scientific journals have made life easier for scientists as well as publishers. No more ambling down to the library, searching through the musty stacks and queuing up for the photocopier. Instead, a few clicks of a mouse can bring forth the desired papers and maybe others that the reader did not know [...]

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Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of [...]

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The bogus trend story thrives thanks to the journalists who never let the facts get in the way when they think they’ve discovered some new social tendency. Take, for example, the story on Page One in today’s New York Times titled “A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss.” Its first sentence declares, “Eating [...]

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