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Could You Hack Your Brain To Get More Motivated?
NPR: We know we should put the cigarettes away or make use of that gym membership, but in the moment, we just don't do it. There is a cluster of neurons in our brain critical for motivation, though. What if you could hack them to motivate yourself? These neurons are located in the middle of the brain, in a region called the ventral tegmental area. A paper published Thursday in the journal Neuron suggests that we can activate the region with a little bit of training. ... That changed when the participants were allowed to watch a neurofeedback meter that displayed activity in their ventral tegmental area.
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Psychology Is in Crisis Over Whether It’s in Crisis
Wired: LAST SUMMER, THE field of psychology had a moment—possibly one of the most influential events in science last year. On August 27, 2015, a group called the Open Science Collaboration published the results of its Reproducibility Project, a three-year effort to re-do 100 psychology studies. Replication is, of course, one of the fundamental tenets of good science. The group wanted to see how many of the original effects they could replicate. The result: It only worked about 40 percent of the time. That did not go over well. But now the psychology establishment is fighting back.
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Here’s why you won’t really move to Canada if Trump wins in November
The Washington Post: Every four years, thousands of Americans threaten to leave the United States if the “wrong” candidate becomes president. For many voters this year, that candidate is Donald Trump. ... Why do so many disgruntled voters threaten to leave the country, only to see so few actually follow through? Because people overestimate how much pain they’ll feel when they experience a dreaded outcome. This isn’t news to psychologists. In 1978, Philip Brickman and his colleagues interviewed accident victims, lottery winners and a control sample of people who hadn’t experienced an unexpected major life event, good or bad.
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The incredible power of ignoring everything
The Washington Post: Fyodor Dostoevsky, the 19th Century Russian author, once famously challenged his brother to try out a strange task: Don't think about a polar bear right now. “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute,” Dostoevsky writes in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.” Since then, people have puzzled over what happens in the brain when we try intentionally to ignore things. Can we actually succeed in ignoring certain information -- and improve our focus on everything else?
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The Trollable Self-Driving Car
Slate: On Feb. 14, a Google self-driving car attempted to pass a municipal bus in Mountain View, California. The bus did not behave as the autonomous car predicted, and the self-driving car crashed into it while attempting to move back into its lane. The Google car was traveling at the stately speed of 2 mph, and there were no injuries. Google released a statement accepting fault and announcing that it was tweaking its software to avoid this type of collision in the future. There is good reason to believe, though, that tweaks to the software might not be enough. What led the Google car astray was the inability to correctly guess out what the bus driver was thinking and then react to it. ...
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New Critique Sees Flaws in Landmark Analysis of Psychology Studies
The New York Times: A landmark 2015 report that cast doubt on the results of dozens of published psychology studies has exposed deep divisions in the field, serving as a reality check for many working researchers but as an affront to others who continue to insist the original research was sound. On Thursday, a group of four researchers publicly challenged the report, arguing that it was statistically flawed and, as a result, wrong. The 2015 report, called the Reproducibility Project, found that less than 40 studies in a sample of 100 psychology papers in leading journals held up when retested by an independent team.
