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Cibo più gustoso grazie ai rituali (Food is tastier thanks to rituals)
La Stampa: Cappellini, trombette, stelle filanti e canti a squarciagola. Sono questi gli elementi che caratterizzano la buona riuscita di una festa. Quando si tratta di un compleanno, poi, si aggiunge il momento magico dello spegnimento delle candeline – ovviamente con l’immancabile richiesta di desiderio da realizzare entro l’anno a venire. Ma la torta, anche se semplice, assume caratteristiche di maggiore gustosità e dolcezza che non si percepiscono in altri momenti. Il motivo di tutto ciò se so lo sono domandati alcuni ricercatori del Minnesota che hanno dato il via a una serie di studi per comprendere come cambia la valutazione di un cibo a seconda di come lo si mangia.
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An invisible gorilla in your lungs
The Boston Globe: In a famous experiment, researchers asked people to watch a video of a group passing a basketball and count the number of passes. In the middle of the video, someone in a gorilla suit unexpectedly walks through the group—but many viewers fail to notice the gorilla, because they’re so focused on counting passes. In a new experiment, researchers with Harvard Medical School’s Visual Attention Lab have taken this work on “inattentional blindness” one step further. They asked radiologists to look for nodules in a CT scan of a lung. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Rituals Make Food (and Drinks) Taste Better
TIME: One night as she was enjoying an evening with friends, professor Kathleen Vohs, who teaches marketing at the University of Minnesota, was disappointed to find that the bottle of wine she had bought earlier came with a screw top, not a cork. “I missed the whole ritual of unwrapping the foil and inserting the corkscrew, and feeling that tension,” she says. “It has so many dimensions because I can feel the foil, but everyone else can hear the pop — you know that very satisfying pop.” Because the wine bottle was missing that pop, Vohs and her company agreed that the wine probably wouldn’t be as flavorful.
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Babies Aren’t Afraid of Heights Until They Start Crawling
Smithsonian Magazine: Babies are fearless when it comes to heights. That woozy, faint feeling only starts kicking in around month nine, when babies begin to recoil from the edge of a steep staircase or the drop-off of a changing table. Researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science wondered what changed, and they suspected it was the experience of moving around. The researchers randomly assigned some babies to receive training in using a powered baby go-cart, providing them with locomotor experience, while other babies received no such training. Critically, none of the babies had begun to crawl.
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Heat Wave Psychology: Long Past, Green Future?
The Huffington Post: I live in Maryland, where we have been suffering through an unrelenting heat wave all summer, and I confess I have cranked up the AC on the worst days. But I always feel guilty about it when I do, and I turn it off whenever the air dips back into the tolerable range. So I'm no saint, but I am mindful. I am motivated by thoughts of the future generations, my kids and their kids and all of the people who will have to inhabit this overheating planet. We all make more or less responsible choices like this every day. We drive hybrids or guzzlers, recycle or don't, protest or endorse the Keystone XL pipeline.
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Why Summer Makes Us Lazy
The New Yorker: In his meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “The heat wilts & enervates me & makes me sick,” he wrote in 1852. Sibley lived before the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that his observation is still accurate: summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. One of the key issues is motivation: when the weather is unpleasant, no one wants to go outside, but when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and the sky is blue, leisure calls.
