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Be thankful and make better long-term decisions
The Boston Globe: We are notoriously bad at foregoing instant gratification for longer-term rewards. In laboratory studies and in the real world, people frequently make impatient decisions that economists would call “suboptimal,” and, in real-life terms, result in credit card debt, obesity, or drug addiction. Add emotion to the mix, and the decision-making seems to get worse: sad people make even more impatient financial decisions, one study found. Stamping out emotional responses seems like the best path to making wiser and more logical decisions.
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Q&A: Why 40% of us think we’re in the top 5%
SmartPlanet: In 1996 McArthur Wheeler walked into two banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight, wearing no disguise. The video surveillance caught his face clearly and later that day he was recognized and arrested, to his surprise. He remarked, “But I wore the juice.” Wheeler mistakenly believed that rubbing lemon juice over your face and body rendered you invisible to video cameras. He had tested this apparently, by shooting a Polaroid of himself, and somehow his image mysteriously never appeared in the shot.
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Got A Hobby? Might Be A Smart Professional Move
NPR: Maybe you paint, keep a journal or knit. Or maybe you play bass in a punk rock band. Whatever hobby you have, keep at it. A little study published this week suggests that having a creative outlet outside the office might help people perform better at work. Psychologists from San Francisco State University found that the more people engaged in their hobbies, the more likely they were to come up with creative solutions to problems on the job. And no matter what the hobby was, these people were also more likely to go out of their way to help co-workers. The findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
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Not Enough Basketballs? The Too-Much-Talent Effect
The NBA playoffs are underway, and the Miami Heat are the odds-on favorite to “three-peat.” If they do—or if they don’t for that matter—the outcome will fuel an enduring debate about how best to build a sports franchise. Back in 2010, the Heat opted to wager hundreds of millions of dollars on the Big 3—signing superstars LeBron James and Chris Bosh on top of pricey local favorite Dwayne Wade. James boastfully predicted a Heat dynasty, while cynics chanted a more skeptical mantra: “Not enough basketballs” for those super egos. Is there such a thing as having too much talent?
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Speed-Reading Apps May Impair Reading Comprehension by Limiting Ability to Backtrack
To address the fact that many of us are on the go and pressed for time, app developers have devised speed-reading software that eliminates the time we supposedly waste by moving our eyes as we read. But don’t throw away your books, papers, and e-readers just yet -- research suggests that the eye movements we make during reading actually play a critical role in our ability to understand what we’ve just read. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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The Surprising Science of Yawning
The New Yorker: In 1923, Sir Francis Walshe, a British neurologist, noticed something interesting while testing the reflexes of patients who were paralyzed on one side of their bodies. When they yawned, they would spontaneously regain their motor functions. In case after case, the same thing happened; it was as if, for the six or so seconds the yawn lasted, the patients were no longer paralyzed. What’s more, Walshe reported that some of his patients had noticed “that when the fingers are extended and abducted during a yawn, they are able to flex and extend them rapidly, a thing they were unable to do at any other time.
