I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.
As you know, 74 people were killed this Wednesday when Egyptian soccer fans stampeded into a bottleneck after a 3-1 hometown upset win. While certainly tragic, it’s far from irrational: it turns out the behavioral economics were stacked against them.Take the link between football and domestic violence. In2011 economists Gordon Dahl and David Card showed that when a home team loses, domestic violence in the home city increases by 10- percent. On police reports, you can see reports start to rise in the final quarter as a loss looks likely. Then reports peak an hour after the game and return to normal a couple hours later.
A study of 64,659 women, recently published in the journal Academic Radiology, found that while 1,246 of these women were at high enough breast cancer risk to recommend additional screening with MRI, only 173 of these women returned to the clinic within a year for the additional screening.“It’s hard to tell where, exactly, is the disconnect,” says Deborah Glueck, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and associate professor of biostatistics and informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health, the paper’s senior author.
Conventional wisdom holds you're born with perfect pitch or you're not. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Here's how to train perfect pitch.For my book Brain Trust, I interviewed Diana Deutsch, University of California San Diego professor and president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and she said the trick is pairing pitch with meaning -- early!
Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.Here's what he said.
I hope you didn't see my first-to-worst performance in last night's hotties vs. nerds edition of ABC's WIPEOUT. If you did, you know what happened: after winning the round of 24 by almost a minute and then winning the round of 12 by the equivalent of a furlong, I got stuck in the round of six trying one element over and over -- the wrong way -- as people I had beaten in the first two rounds passed and eventually eliminated me.Nuts--'twas a very good shot at $50k that my family of four surviving on my writer's salary could've used.
Believe it or not, I’m rarely accused of being a romantic. I know, I know — baffling! And this even after I brought home Thai food for our anniversary. Okay, I forgot the anniversary. But a couple days later when I brought home Thai food, boy was my wife surprised! Okay, okay, I didn’t actually *bring home* Thai food, because, you know, I was walking home from the park with the kids in the double stroller and by the time I got home it would’ve been cold…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Does it take effort to tell the truth or are you naturally honest? In other words, are you truthful or a liar? A Harvard neuroimaging study showed that you're wired to be one or the other. The study watched subjects' brains as they were presented with the opportunity to win money through lying. When honest people told the truth, their brains were at peace. When dishonest people lied, the control centers of their brains crackled to overwrite the truth with a lie. And here's the cool part: even when dishonest people happened to tell the truth, researchers watched their brains actively override the temptation to lie.
It's worth dusting this off: a simple, accurate equation that decides to the penny how much you should spend on anyone's gift this holiday season. Get cracking you slacker.
In the month of December (and October, November, and January), PA systems in malls around the country play holiday music. And when we hear the telltale pa-rum-pum-pum-pum we want to strangle the nearest elf. Maybe kick a reindeer.In the month of December (and October, November, and January), PA systems in malls around the country play holiday music. And when we hear the telltale pa-rum-pum-pum-pum we want to strangle the nearest elf. Maybe kick a reindeer.
The age-old dilemma: do you take your sig other's hints, buy that electronic picture frame, and load it with family highlights from holidays past (yawn)? Or do you go with your gut and get her the unexpected gift of a new XBox-360?
Paleontologists recently unearthed bones, likely in Montana or Wyoming, of a new dinosaur species dubbed Stochastisaurus. "Based on surrounding species and the fossils themselves, there's an approximately 88% chance that Stochastisaurus was an herbivore," says the lead researcher.
First, I'm afraid I fell victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get in involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this: probability is not additive (as a couple astute Times readers have now pointed out--before going further, you might want to read my Frankie the Fixer puzzle in the left sidebar of THIS PAGE).
