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.
Did you get visit here after quickly vanquishing my puzzles in this morning's New York Times Science section? If so, you're likely ready for a new challenge.Below are the puzzles the Times cut — because they're too darn tricky or perhaps because the first gently pokes fun at the sacred cow that is Mariano Rivera. But they're certainly not too tricky for you, gentle reader.No, no, if you've made it this far, they're right up your alley.
What happens when you die? What's right and wrong? What's the purpose of life? Aaaaarrghhh! Chill out, God has the answers. And the religious part of your brain knows it. The anterior cingulated cortex is the human home of anxiety. And it's increasingly chill in people with religious conviction. In fact this anxiety center is quieter in people with any strong convictions that answer big questions, including conservative political ideologies. (Lest ye nail this author to the cross of liberal media bias, this is not necessarily a bad thing: it seems that many people could benefit from a chill pill shoved into their brain's anxiety center.)
Imagine you're navigating a three-dimensional maze. Believe it or not, in this situation, both men and women think. Only, women think with the distinctly human right prefrontal cortex, while men use the rat-brain navigational instincts of their left hippocampus (according to fMRI studies). Basically, what this means is that while men efficiently snuffle around the corridors, rationally and analytically memorizing each branching path, women look at the map. And if the map is unclear, they ask directions (not to reinforce a pop stereotype, or anything).
In my post about the somewhat wretched dating website HotOrNot.com, I wrote about researchers' determination that all humans value the same standards of beauty.Really, no matter if you're hot or plain, you recognize a set standard of hotness—your self-image is subject to your creative delusions, but there's an inviolable piece of humanity that knows the truth about others. And so the obvious question is what about poultry? Specifically, are turkeys turned on by hot models?Today, of all days, I'm sure you can see the importance of this research.
We know the mouth is a useful orifice for venting our feelings: if we're "hot," speaking our anger can help us "cool off". And so the bigger the mouth, the better the cooling, right? Actually, yes. When our brain gets hot, we cool it through the mouth, and the best way to cool through the mouth is by yawning. Researchers showed this by cooking parakeets. Okay, they stopped short of actually cooking them, but they found that when temperature increased, the parakeet yawn rate doubled (there was no description of researchers' yawn rates).
Last week while baking muffins with my son's preschool class, I set fire to the school. Okay, technically I didn't set it on fire—it was only butter smoke from the tin that set off the alarm, necessitating the entire school of a couple hundred kids filing out to the basketball courts while the fire department arrived en mass.Anyway, after the holiday break my wife will be back for Wednesday cooking and I don't imagine Thanksgiving will be NEARLY so exciting. Besides, Leif was line leader that day, and he was really, very proud to lead the class evacuation.
Equations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond.But what about relating speed and MESS? Simply, how fast should you expect a clean kids' room to get messy?
In the Iowa Gambling Task, a participant is presented with four, facedown decks of cards. He or she can flip over cards from any deck. Most cards earn a reward and some cards incur a penalty. Of the four decks, some are better (contain more reward-earning cards) than others.Over time, participants should learn which decks are best and start flipping cards only from the highest-paying decks. The test is thought to measure the emotional component of learning, or intuition—based on reward and punishment, participants begin to "feel" which decks are best and worst.
If only you could ditch that traumatic memory, that craving, that debilitating fear of ventriloquist dummies (autonomatonophobia)! But these tendencies are so deeply ingrained that try as you might, you can't dig them out. Maybe you can drug them out. The process of recalling a memory is like a rolling snowball——a trigger provides the first ball, which then rolls through various parts of your brain picking up the additional elements it needs to become a full memory.
Are you traumatized by terror flicks? Maybe more than you know. Scary movies actually create a light version of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what causes bad dreams and irrational fears of kids riding Big Wheels in hotel hallways (and, perhaps more rationally, of Jack Nicholson peeking through axe holes into your bathroom). And by exploring how people stop these dreams and fears, researchers are learning how we might combat more serious PTSD. For instance, researchers find that talking about a horror movie afterward reduces the occurrence of bad dreams.
Want a real Halloween nightmare? Imagine filling your child's too-small bucket in the first three houses and going home with only a small slice of your kid's potential rake. But if you allow your little monster (or in my case, blue whale with pink and purple barnacles), to carry a big bag, you should be prepared to spend the hours and hours (and hours) needed to fill it.Bad news: there are nightmares on both ends of the bag guesstimation spectrum.
Yesterday, I posted Game Theory's El Farol Bar problem, with a couple questions. (If you haven't read it yet, go back—the answer's no good without the puzzle.) And the truth is there's no answer, or more precisely, there's no pure strategy that works—if everyone decides to go, the bar's too crowded and it's no fun; if everyone decides to stay home, the bar will be empty and it would've been more fun to go.
