Mirjam Tuk: think before you wee | Technology | The Observer. Mirjam Tuk is from the faculty of behavioural sciences at the University of Twente, Netherlands. She and her colleagues recently won an Ig Nobel prize in medicine for their research into the effects of controlling your bladder on your ability to control decisions in other areas.
The Ig Nobels, in their 21st year, are awarded for improbable research that "first makes people laugh and then makes them think". What led you to study this area? Did you drink a lot of coffee before a lecture? The lecture that I was attending was on impulse control by one of my colleagues, Luk Warlop, in which he argued that hunger and sexual arousal could make people more impulsive. How did you test the theory? In several experiments, I told people they were taking part in a water-tasting test. How full where their bladders? I couldn't look in their bladders but some of them were crossing their legs. What is going on in this process? We didn't do neuroimaging studies so this is speculation.
Yes. I'm not sure. How do you really know what time it is? Very interesting article, Annalee. It may as well be the most interesting article you've written for io9 so far, in my opinion. "So your brain processes what you see more slowly than it processes what you hear. Nobody is sure why this is. " I'm totally speculating here, but perhaps it's because light signals have a (much?) Larger "information bandwidth" than sound signals. Sound is a longitudinal wave, meaning that it cannot be polarized. Although it's true that human eyes aren't directly sensitive to the polarization of light (bees' eyes, if I'm not mistaken, are), it doesn't mean that we don't perceive polarization-dependent effects. Color (that is, the frequency of light) is also an important clue in interpreting what we see. One aspect common to both sound and light which is more important in our interpretation of sounds, though, is phase.
Phase is more important for our detection of sounds, but frequency (color) and polarization are essential visual clues. Something else. Digital Overload: Too Much Technology Takes a Toll. It’s the great irony of the digital age. It seems that the more we do, the less that we get done. Many experts believe it’s our own digital dust that’s dragging us down. Our constant connectedness, the beeping and buzzing and bleeping digital devices we carry around, aren’t just causing us to become mega-multitaskers, they are also taking a social and financial toll. Basex, a research firm that specializes in technical issues in the workplace, reckons that information overload is responsible for economic losses of $900 billion a year at work. The real due bill, though, may be for the damage this busyness has inflicted on our productivity, creativity and the quality of our relationships.
[The scientific approach to the problem: Digital Overload: Is Your Computer Frying Your Brain?] The first warning sign is usually a heightened sense of having too much going on that requires a constant toggling of our attention, he said. “You have to recognize what’s going on,” he said. Dr. “But lo! Take A Walk to Protect Your Memory. Another study has joined the chorus that physical exercise may help prevent mental decline among older adults. The latest research comes from the National Institute of Aging and was published in the October 13th online issue of the American Academy of Neurology's Neurology. In the study, scientists recruited 299 dementia-free people. These respondents recorded the number of blocks they walked per week. Nine years later, their brains were scanned to measure brain size.
At this point, the results showed that participants who had walked at least 72 blocks per week, roughly equaling six to nine miles, had greater gray matter volume than people who didn't walk as much. Walking more than 72 blocks didn't make brains any bigger. Four years later, scientists returned again. Tests were given to determine if anyone had developed dementia. How to Handle Excuse #15: Connectivity | Tales from Technomadia. Map: The Big World Of Non-Monogamous Relationships. @carapatricia: I tried monopoly, didn't work. If I don't know the details, I imagine the worst, if I know the details, I obsess. @biancajames: you could not pass erection and you went to jail? @biancajames: It's true, Denial is a perfectly good place to live. Current population about 3,000,000,000. Happy as clams. @carapatricia: Works pretty well for me too, in my secondary relationship (he's kind of a slut and I don't care to know the details, we're safe, we have fun, etc).
We've been poly for 10 years. We are not really part of a poly "scene" though—usually when I come across a scene of any kind, I feel kind of limited. Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps - Tony Schwartz. By Tony Schwartz | 2:08 PM September 20, 2010 Good luck, right? But here’s the reality: naps are a powerful source of competitive advantage. The recent evidence is overwhelming: naps are not just physically restorative, but also improve perceptual skills, motor skills, reaction time and alertness. I experienced the power of naps myself when I was writing my new book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. When I awoke, I felt incredibly rejuvenated. When Sara Mednick, a former Harvard researcher, gave her subjects a memory challenge, she allowed half of them to take a 60 to 90 minute nap. When pilots are given a nap of just 30 minutes on long haul flights, they experience a 16 percent improvement in their reaction time.
The conclusion is inescapable: the more hours we work continuously, the greater the toll on our performance. The best time for a nap is between 1 and 3 pm, when the body most craves a period of sleep.
Life hacks... Sitting is a killer. Study of Alpha Male Baboons Shows It’s Stressful at the Top. From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities. The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position.
But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe. It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1. Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males. Robert M. Earlier work by Dr.