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
Sugar IS addictive
From Discover magazine’s DiscoBlog:
Move Over, Heroin: “Sugar Addiction” May Be a Reality
Salad or fries with that?
Do you want salad or fires with that? It seems a healthy option actually makes you more likely to pick the junk food. Great for fast-food companies’ bottom lines.
From The National Post, April 30, 2009:
Thinking about eating healthy can fool brain into choosing fat: new study
Anne Harding, Reuters
Your brain on religion
Religion can be very useful: reduced stress, lower anxiety, improved cognitive abilities. But nothing comes without a price: religion hinders the ability to fix your mistakes.
From The Globe and Mail, March 5, 2009:
This is your brain on religion
Believers record lower levels of anxiety, which can boost performance but also hinder the ability to fix mistakes, study finds
Love or sex for creative thinking?
Check out “Solve that baffling problem” for an exploration of how psychological distancing helps creative thinking. Then read the article below how being in love does the same — but thinking of sex does not! From Scientific American, September 29, 2009:
Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?
A new study demonstrates that thinking about love–but not about sex–causes us to think more “globally,” making it easier to come up with new ideas
Eat your way to a better brain
From the July 17th, 2008 edition of The Economist:
Cognition nutrition
Food for thought
Eat your way to a better brain
How Much of Your Memory Is True?
As it turns out, you can’t always tell — just confirms how much you cannot trust your memories.
From the August 3, 2009 edition of Discover Magazine:
How Much of Your Memory Is True?
New research shows that memories are constantly being re-written by our minds.
Solve that baffling problem
Got a problem that’s baffling you? You could try inverse thinking — focus on what would not solve the problem. But you’ll have a better chance of solving it if you imagine the problem to be far away, time- or distance-wise. The article below from Scientific American explains why. But if you really aspire to be more creative, you should live abroad for a while — as explained in the article from the Economist, shown after this one.
From Scientific American, July 21, 2009:
An Easy Way to Increase Creativity
Why thinking about distant things can make us more creative
Why do we swear?
It seems swearing reduces pain, so go ahead and let it loose when you hammer your finger instead of the nail. But beware — the more you use them, the less potent those swearwords become!
From Scientific American News - July 12, 2009:
Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
Dropping the F-bomb or other expletives may not only be an expression of agony, but also a means to alleviate it
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. 
