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Food Tastes Bland While Multitasking
Scientific American Mind: Eating while distracted is well known to cause overindulgence, as confirmed by a recent review of 24 studies published in April 2013 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The exact mechanism behind such mindless bingeing, however, has been unclear. A recent study in Psychological Science suggests that mentally taxing tasks dampen our perception of taste, causing us to eat more. In four experiments, participants attempted to memorize either a seven-digit number (a heavy load on the brain) or one digit (a light cognitive load) while tasting salty, sweet and sour substances and rating each food's taste intensity. Read the whole story: Scientific American Mind
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The Retirement Fear Factor
If you’re like a majority of American adults, you aren’t putting away enough money to keep your current standard of living when you retire. When you’re young, retirement seems light years away. But most financial advisers have far less patience for middle-aged workers who lack a strong savings plan. But for many workers, fear — rather than complacency — may be the reason certain individuals are not putting enough money away, according to a recently published study. In fact, anxiety about retirement can actually disrupt an individual’s capacity to digest information about retirement planning, Oklahoma State University psychological researchers found.
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Why Gamers Can’t Stop Playing First-Person Shooters
The New Yorker: In the fall of 1992, a twentysomething college dropout and former juvenile offender named John Carmack was hard at work in Mesquite, Texas, on a new concept for a video game. It would merge the first-person perspective of a game like Myst with the direct combat of the shooter game Wolfenstein 3-D and the multi-player capacity of Spectre, and it would do so in a more realistic three-dimensional environment than any game before it. The following year, Carmack and his five colleagues at id Software released the product of that vision: Doom. They knew that they were on to something big.
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low blood sugar
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The Brain’s Way Of Dealing With ‘Us’ and ‘Them’
The Wall Street Journal: A tribe of shepherds brings its sheep to graze at a common field. Every shepherd limits the size of his herd to avoid overgrazing the commons—except for one selfish guy who doesn't care. What should be done to solve this problem? Now consider two rival tribes of shepherds being forced to share the same field. In one tribe, the herd is communally owned, while the second tribe would divide the field into fenced plots belonging to each individual. What should be done to reconcile these two different views?
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The Case Against Brain Scans As Evidence In Court
NPR: It's not just people who go on trial these days. It's their brains. More and more lawyers are arguing that some defendants deserve special consideration because they have brains that are immature or impaired, says Nina Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University who has been studying the use of brain science in court. About 5 percent of murder trials now involve some neuroscience, Farahany says. "There's a steady increase of defendants seeking to introduce neuroscience to try to reduce the extent to which they're responsible or the extent to which they're punished for a crime," she says.
