Blog

  • More Procrastination

    This time, a long New Yorker article reviewing The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term…

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  • Erasing Trauma

    Scientists giving mice electric shocks, tracking fear— –noticed that an unusual protein appeared in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions.  That molecule remained for only a few days and appeared to strengthen the brain circuit responsible for maintaining the fearful memory.  But when the researchers eliminated the protein during this period, mice…

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  • Your Flirting Style

    A study says self-awareness about your flirting style helps dating, helps relationships. “Knowing something about the way you communicate attraction says something about challenges you might have had in your past dating life,” Hall said. “Hopefully, this awareness can help people avoid those mistakes and succeed in courtship.” The five styles of flirting named: physical, traditional,…

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  • Friends with Cognitive Benefits

    A study likes conversation. Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems, a new University of Michigan study shows. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits…

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  • Proofiness

    Beware of iffy-seeming stats:  An interview with Charles Seife, author of Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. The issue is that in medicine or any other field of study, it’s really easy to show that two things are linked in some manner…A number of years ago there was a study that showed the higher…

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