The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
Failure can be good for you, if you let it. This article explains the why and the how. An illuminating quote:
“…we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories.”
Check out the “How to learn from failure” part at the end of the article. From Wired, Jan 2010:
Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
Do your balls hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro? Hilarious follow-up to the Secrets of the Phallus, explaining all that’s hangin’…
From Scientific American, November 19, 2009:
Why do human testicles hang like that?
Pros of being sad
Happy moods promote creativity and flexibility — but also gullability. Sad moods make you more critical, improve your ability to judge and remember.
From Smart Planet, Nov 5, 2009:
A bad mood can help you think more clearly
By Andrew Nusca
// //
Apparently, misery loves productivity.
Bad moods can be good for you, according to a new study.
Pinker on Gladwell
An eye-opening review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “What the dog saw” by Steven Pinker – I will be much more careful of accepting Gladwell’s conclusions from here on. From the New York Times:
Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective
Placebo effect is real
Spinal-cord neural activity found when individuals were convinced that their pain would be alleviated by a cream treatment, irrespective of whether the cream was real or a placebo. From Smartplanet.com:
Placebo effect not all in your head
By Dana Blankenhorn | Oct 16, 2009
Emotion sensor to keep your cool
Want to avoid rash decisions you later regret? Bracelet warns you when you are too emotional/stressed. Designed for traders, but I could think of some others that should be wearing it. 
From The Economist Oct. 15th, 2009 edition:
Emotions and investing
Gutted instinct
A new device to prevent irrational online trades
The nature of wealth
Financial assets are a claim on real wealth, not outright wealth. From the October 8th 2009 edition of The Economist:
Buttonwood
The nature of wealth
The world confused financial assets with real ones
Suffering leads to belief in god
It seems misery loves supernatural explanations…
Excerpt from “Bering in Mind”’s God’s in Mississippi, where the gettin’ is good:
…. In an article soon to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Review , Harvard psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner argue that human suffering and God go hand-in-hand because our evolved cognitive systems are inherently unsatisfied with “sh*t happens” types of explanations (that is to say, reality). The main gist of their argument is that, since we’re such a deeply social species, when bad things happen to us we immediately launch a search for the responsible human party. In being morally vigilant this way–in seeking to identify the culpable party–we can effectively punish blameworthy, antisocial people, thus preserving our group’s functional cohesion and preserving each individual’s genetic interests. That’s all fine and dandy, say Gray and Wegner, when someone punches us in the face, steals from us or sleeps with our girlfriend; but when our misfortune is more “abstract” (think cancer or a tsunami) and there’s no obvious single human agent to blame, we see the hand of God.
Sugar IS addictive
From Discover magazine’s DiscoBlog:
Move Over, Heroin: “Sugar Addiction” May Be a Reality
About
Although it started out as a means of practising expressing myself, this blog is turning out to be more of a compendium of interesting information I come across. One of these days I’ll have to actually write something as opposed to cut and paste.
