SONG: Cloudbusting (by Kate Bush) (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Cloudbusting” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. I was late with the last song. This […]
psychology
12-year-old solves psych problem with Monster Manual.
Yep. It’s the beholder. Discover shows how a D&D-playing kid helped solve a longstanding problem with how humans react to eyes: In 1998, [University of […]
The mere anticipation of an interaction with a woman can impair men’s cognitive performance.
No one can possibly do better than the Archives of Sexual Behavior in describing this study. The article’s headline says all it needs to: The […]
Cannabis does lower IQ. By about 8 points.
The Independent has a surprisingly lucid summary of a 25-year longitudinal study of cannabis users from ages 13 to 38. And they found that teen […]
Learn in your sleep. With your nose….
Nature sniffs out a technique for using smells to pick up new information – and new emotional responses – in your sleep: Anat Arzi of […]
Monday’s no worse than Tuesday, say grim-faced scientists.
BBC dispels the myth that Monday’s any more miserable than any other weekday (with the exception, of course, of Friday): US investigators who looked at […]
The Neuroscience of Gotye.
Fun to read Sound on Sound’s behind-the-mixing-board analysis of what made “Somebody That I Used To Know” so darn catchy – even though it breaks […]
Parasites linked to suicides.
Scientific American’s “Science Sushi” blog rolls up some recent research connecting cat-parasite Toxoplasma gondii with human suicides: in Denmark, serum antibody levels for Toxoplasma gondii […]
Musical selection. (Or how to evolve a hit.)
Science News examines one system for making music – by taking noise and using thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to refine it: Inspired in part by […]
We only ever glimpse things in flashes….
Medical Xpress takes a closer look at the hazy, flickering way we really perceive the world: The [University of Glasgow] researchers studied a prominent brain […]
Stupid pesticide lowers your kids’ IQs.
AFP goes even farther than that. A common pesticide actually changes the structure of kids’ brains: The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy […]
They really can remember for you, wholesale….
The Freakonomics guys look at what it means to be able to make memories from scratch: Psychologists Andrew Clark, Robert A. Nash, Gabrielle Fincham, and […]
SONG: “Inside the Box”
SONG: “Inside the Box.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “CEOs and the Candle Problem”, Nature, “A Mad Hemorrhage” […]
About those CEO bonuses: How financial incentives make us less creative.
Nature blogger Graham Morehead isn’t looking over any new research with this post, which makes it all the more remarkable. Since the early 1960s, we’ve […]
Language is the music of emotion.
PLoS ONE presents research on music and words, showing that, no matter what language you use, speaking an emotion uses the same sounds as playing […]