How your ancestors' farms shaped your thinking - life - 08 May 2014. It is a cliché to say that East Asians think in terms of the group, while Westerners think in terms of the individual. But there is some truth to it, and part of the explanation may lie in what our ancestors ate. Rice farming seems to have fostered collective thinking while wheat farming favoured individualism. The popular image of Americans and Europeans as individualist and innovative, versus Asians as collectivist and conforming, is partly true. People from the West and Far East can and do think in both ways, but these peoples' cognitive styles divide broadly along those lines.
Researchers have proposed many possible explanations for these cultural habits, including differences in prosperity and rates of infectious disease. Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville wondered if a region's long-term way of life is what matters: specifically, whether its people grow rice or wheat. Rice-minded Talhelm spotted a natural experiment in China. Growing rice is hard work. What solitary confinement does to the brain – Shruti Ravindran.
Heavy-set, with a soft-jowled face, King has a distinctly ursine air about him. We first meet at a Wendy’s in downtown Brooklyn, his teddy-bearishness rounded out by a plushy layer of cocoa-coloured velour tracksuit with a matching hoodie, T-shirt, and beanie hat. He is a garrulous, flirty raconteur. He leans in close over the small white plastic table in the corner and shares, in a gravelly voice, his penchant for Dominican women (‘I’ll take one as my next wife’), his distaste for Indian shop-owners (‘They look at you like you in a zoo.
Or the bottom of they shoe’), and his love for his two-year-old grandbaby Vanny. But when he talks about his three-decade long ‘bid’ in various upstate correctional facilities, punctuated by periods of isolation in ‘the Box’ – a solitary confinement cell – he gets quieter, and stares away, distracted and angry. Popular now Still living with your parents? Why solitary confinement degrades us all Do the phases of the moon affect human behaviour? Are These Walls The Same Height? Your Answer Depends On Where You're From. In the late 1800s, German psychiatrist Franz Müller-Lyer designed one of the world's most famous visual illusions. The illusion became popular because it was easy to re-create and very difficult to shake. It began with a simple question: Which of the following two vertical lines above is longer?
If you're like almost everyone whom Müller-Lyer tested, Line B will appear longer than Line A. In fact, the two lines are identical in length, as this doctored version of the illusion shows: For decades, vision researchers assumed that the illusion told us something fundamental about human vision.
How was it that African bushmen and tribespeople were immune to the illusion, when they shared the same visual and neutral anatomy as the Westerners who couldn't shake the sense that Line B was longer than Line A? From years of living indoors in structures with perpendicular walls, you know without even paying attention that the two walls are the same height. Too much choice makes people take riskier decisions.
Players' decisions were analysed over a gambling game with changing oddsStudy found participants made riskier decisions the more choice they hadResearchers have labelled the phenomenon 'search-amplified risk' By Suzannah Hills Published: 16:31 GMT, 26 March 2013 | Updated: 07:35 GMT, 27 March 2013 People make riskier decisions when they are given more choice, according to a study into how we behave when faced with large amounts of information. Participants took part in a gambling game where players were analysed on their decision-making when faced with a large number of potential gambles.
Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Lugano found that a bias in the way people gather information leads them to take more risks when they choose a gamble from a large set of options. Researchers have labelled the phenomenon 'search-amplified risk'. 'They are making rational decisions, but these decisions are based on faulty information gathering. Got an annoying song stuck in your head? Well, that's probably because you love it. Researchers found that liked songs often become intrusive to listeners'Contradicts myth' that only 'obnoxious songs' become stuck in one's headStudy found songs are more likely to get stuck during challenging activity By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 05:55 GMT, 20 February 2013 | Updated: 09:50 GMT, 20 February 2013 Irritating: Psychologists at Western Washington University found that songs people know and like often become more intrusive than songs people actively dislike It is a feeling we have all experienced - an irritating song that just will not leave your head.
But despite the widely help opinion that only the most infuriating songs get buried in your head, research has suggested we might actually like the songs that push us close to migraines. Using songs by artists such as Lady Gaga, scientists proved that songs people know and like frequently become more intrusive than songs people dislike. 'There is a general belief that intrusive songs occur primarily for disliked songs.' How to Detect When Someone's Lying (and Get Them to Tell the Truth) Flattery will get you anywhere! Evidence shows that compliments make people perform better.
By Anna Edwards Published: 04:17 GMT, 12 November 2012 | Updated: 09:47 GMT, 12 November 2012 The old adage of 'flattery will get you anywhere may just have been proved as scientifically true. A team of researchers have found evidence that we do actually perform better when we receive a compliment. Being told nice things can stimulate the brain in the same way as being rewarded with cold hard cash to make us improve our work. Complimenting someone could be key to improving their performance in work and school The findings have led the team of Japanese scientists, lead by National Institute for Physiological Sciences Professor Norihiro Sadato, to suggest that compliments could be used to help improve performance in schools.
Professor Sadato said: 'To the brain, receiving a compliment is as much a social reward as being rewarded money. 'We've been able to find scientific proof that a person performs better when they receive a social reward after completing an exercise. Brain Scans of Hoarders Reveal Why They Never De-Clutter. Image courtesy of iStockphoto/AbackPhotography Jill, a 60-year-old woman in Milwaukee, has overcome extreme poverty. So, now that she has enough money to put food in the fridge, she fills it. She also fills her freezer, her cupboard and every other corner of her home. “I use duct tape to close the freezer door sometimes when I’ve got too many things in there,” she told A&E’s Hoarders. Film footage of her kitchen shows a cat scrambling over a rotten grapefruit; her counters—and most surfaces in her home—seemed to be covered with several inches of clutter and spoiled food.
Jill joins many others who have been outed on reality TV as a “hoarder.” Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School of Medicine’s David Tolin. Some people hoard particular types of things, such as newspapers, craft supplies or clothing. Hoarding disorder, or why refusing to throw anything away is all in the brain. By Jenny Hope Published: 23:25 GMT, 6 August 2012 | Updated: 09:56 GMT, 10 August 2012 People who can’t bear to throw things away really do have brains that work differently, claim researchers. Brains scans confirm that victims of hoarding disorder have abnormal activity in regions of the brain involved in decision making - particularly in what to do with objects that belong to them. Hoarders not only collect too many things, they feel unable to throw them out even if they’re useless.
Hoarding could now be considered a separate disorder from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. A new US study shows for the first time that a particular brain region becomes over-active when hoarders are asked to dispose of their own possessions. However, the same part of the brain is under-active when hoarders are asked what to do about items not belonging to them. The findings may also partly explain why people have different attitudes toward personal possessions, even if they don’t have a full-blown disorder. Moments of Genius.