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Right Brained, Wrong Brained: How Caltech Neuroscience Became a Buzzfeed Quiz
Los Angeles Magazine: Somewhere between art class and algebra, most of us learn—probably after struggling in one area and excelling in the other—which “side” of our brain is dominant. You are either left brained or right brained. (And if you are in doubt, you can turn to any number of online tests to peg your hemispheric tendencies once and for all.) Left brainers are supposed to be analytical, orderly, mathematical, and good with language. Right brainers tend to be more disorganized, creative, artistic, and visual. A test on BuzzFeed informs me that I’m right brained, though as a science writer, my background would suggest that I draw more from the left.
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Conformity Starts Young
Scientific American: Nobody likes a show-off. So someone with a singular skill will often hide that fact to fit in with a group. A recent study reported for the first time that this behavior begins as early as two years old. In the study, led by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and published in Psychological Science, two-year-old children, chimpanzees and orangutans dropped a ball into a box divided into three sections, one of which consistently resulted in a reward (chocolate for the children; a peanut for the apes).
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Itchy Trigger Finger? How About Itchy Brain?
The Huffington Post: Police work is very dangerous, often involving bad people with guns, and one of the most dangerous policing tasks is searching and clearing a house. This is where the police go through a building room to room in pursuit of a suspect who may be armed and dangerous. The police officer must be fully prepared to shoot -- finger on the trigger, mind alert -- in case he or she does confront a suspect who is armed and ready to shoot. But the officer must also have the self-restraint to refrain from pulling the trigger if he or she bursts into a room and confronts an innocent bystander.
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How Not to Be the Next Brian Williams
Slate: For years, Brian Williams told various versions of a story about his experiences during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Last week, he admitted he had gotten crucial facts wrong, and he apologized. It’s possible that Williams was lying all along for self-aggrandizing reasons, but his serial misstatements could also be the product of ordinary, unintentional memory distortion. We may never know which is true. But the scientific evidence for the fallibility of human memory is now so well established and widespread that claims of false memory should no longer earn anyone a free pass.
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A Solo Traveler’s Guide to Meeting People
The New York Times: When you are traveling solo, it’s not always a breeze to strike up a conversation with a stranger. In fact, how do you meet other single travelers or locals in the first place? And if you’re looking for friendship — or even something more — how do you ensure that amid all the fun you don’t neglect to take safety precautions? Before we get to tactics, it’s helpful to know that you are likely to be rewarded for overcoming apprehensions about approaching someone new when you’re on the road.
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Just Feeling Like Part of a Team Increases Motivation on Challenging Tasks
New research finds that just the sense that we’re working together with others can dramatically increase our motivation to complete difficult tasks—even when we’re actually working alone. Across five experiments Stanford psychological scientists Priyanka B.
