November 2009 Archives

Daily Giving Is Seen as a Healthful Treatment - NYTimes

Ms. Walker gave a gift a day for 29 days -- things like making supportive phone calls or saving a piece of chocolate cake for her husband. The giving didn't cure her multiple sclerosis, of course. But it seems to have had a startling effect on her ability to cope with it. She is more mobile and less dependent on pain medication. The flare-ups that routinely sent her to the emergency room have stopped, and scans show that her disease has stopped progressing.

Can you be blamed for sleepwalking crimes? - New Scientist

A man strangles his wife while dreaming about fighting off intruders in his sleep. Does that make him mad, bad or innocent? Recent research is helping to unpick these issues, and may help reveal who, if anyone, bears responsibility in such cases. Last week, British man Brian Thomas appeared in court on a murder charge after strangling his wife as they slept in their camper van. The prosecution withdrew the charges after three psychiatrists testified that locking him up would serve no useful purpose. The judge said that Thomas bore no responsibility for his actions.

New fight develops over rights of fetuses: Adn.com

He said certain contraception, including the morning-after pill and the intrauterine device, or IUD, could be banned. Someone could also sue a woman who had a miscarriage, Mittman said, by arguing, for example, that she was negligent by going skiing when it was foreseeable she would fall. Legal persons have a variety of rights, Mittman said, including entitlement to permanent fund checks.

"So what's to stop somebody from suing on behalf of an embryo to receive a permanent fund dividend check?" Mittman said. "I mean, how can they not get one if they are a legal person?"

Initiative sponsor Kurka argued that only citizens can receive dividends and that citizens must be born. He said opponents are using scare tactics and absurd scenarios to cloud the issue. "It's about whether or not we as a society are going to recognize the unborn as legal persons and call it for what it is," he said.

Men Often Treat Their Friends Better Than Women Do ~ Cognitive Daily

The male students were significantly more likely to be satisfied with their roommates than female students, whether or not they had a conflict with their roommate. The students also rated their roommates on social interaction, interests, values, and hygiene, and male students gave significantly higher ratings for their roommates than females for every category except hygiene.

What Intelligence Tests Miss ~ Times Higher Education

Stanovich expresses surprise at our failures of rationality and bemoans them, as if we ought to do better because we are rational humans and not irrational animals. I think he is right that we can do better, and that with appropriate educational approaches we would. But is there really something uniquely human about our occasional flashes of rationality? Duane Rumbaugh and David Washburn think not. In their book Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings (2003), they address many of the same definitions of rational behaviour as Stanovich - but they describe these behaviours in non-human primates. Indeed, that book is ideal companion reading to What Intelligence Tests Miss. It is written for the same audience - namely, anyone interested in human intelligence and its manifestations - and its examples are equally vivid. But for Rumbaugh and Washburn, the surprise is the expressions of rationality they see. Where Stanovich gripes about our failure to see beyond the ends of our own noses, they celebrate glimpses of wisdom, insight and understanding that can be used as tools to manipulate the world. Both are, of course, correct.

The curious economic effects of religion - The Boston Globe

The notion that religion influences economies has a long history, but the specifics have been vexingly difficult to pin down. Today, as researchers start to answer the question more definitively with the tools of modern economics, what's emerging is a clearer picture of how nations' prosperity can depend, in part, on seemingly abstract concerns like theology - and sometimes on quite nuanced points of belief or religious fervor.

The Evolution of the God Gene - NYTimes.com

Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland. For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless. For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

The Emerging Science of Self-Control ~The Rational Entrepreneur:

Some additional complications:

• Sitting through a boring film doesn't seem to require self-control; making the decision to get up to leave a boring film does.
• Deliberating between important choices requires self-control and depletes the ego.
• Positive emotions can mitigate ego depletion.
• Having the illusion of control seems to paradoxically strengthen willpower and motivation (in contrast with having to actually think through difficult choices, which depletes the ego).

Now that you know the broad research, the specific decisions of how to hack your brain in your own circumstances to move closer to your "ideal self" are going to vary depending on your individual situation. Some obvious general advice:

1. For important tasks, leverage peer pressure and your social goals to overcome ego depletion.
2. Plan out ahead of time not to succumb to specific predictable temptations.
3. Avoid hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), for example by making a point to not skip meals.

Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart ~New Scientist

The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands. This is a crucial distinction: as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University puts it, intelligence is about brain power whereas rational thinking is about control.

"Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions," explains Evans. "Other people will check out their gut feeling and reason it through and make sure they have a justification for what they're doing." An IQ test cannot predict which of these paths someone will follow, hence the George W. Bush incongruity of people who are supposedly smart acting foolishly.

How to increase altruism in toddlers ~ BPS Research Digest

Surely one of the most charming sights is of an adult struggling to reach an object, only for a toddler to pick up that object and hand it to the adult, as research has shown they so often will. Psychologists think such ingrained altruism has evolved as a consequence of our species' dependence on group living for survival. Supporting this account, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter have shown that subtle exposure to the sight of two apparently companionable dolls, stood side by side, is enough to increase the likelihood that an 18-month-old will help an adult pick up some dropped sticks.

The Conceit of Deceit ~ The Economist

YOU are deciding between two magazines to read. The one you choose just happens to feature photos of women in very small swimsuits. But you do not, you claim, pick that particular magazine for the bathing beauties; it happens to have more interesting articles, or better coverage of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You will say this even in the midst of a lab experiment that has been set up so that the only possible difference between the two magazines is the presence (or absence) of swimsuits...

Further compounding the problem, Ms Chance and Mr Norton's subjects, like the subjects of the similar experiments, showed little sign of being aware that they were merely using a socially acceptable justification to look at women in swimsuits. Mr Norton reports that when he informs participants that they were acting for different reasons than they claimed, they often react with disbelief.

Hyperopia ~ Wired Magazine UK

Ran Kivetz, a business professor at Columbia University, has found a paradox: putting responsibilities ahead of momentary pleasures often leaves us unhappy further down the road. When we skip a holiday to work overtime, or pass up that awesome vintage Porsche for a used minivan, sure, we pat ourselves on the back for a week or two. As the years pass, however, we regret our frugality and wish we'd enjoyed ourselves more.

This is hyperopia: an excess of farsightedness. The future you, it seems, will wish you'd been a bigger hedonist. While we think we're being pragmatic in planning for the future, we forget we want our lives also to include dazzling moments of fun. "When you view your life from a broader lens," Kivetz says, "there's a focus on the feeling you'll miss out on life's pleasures."