Comment

Comment by doone on June 13, 2012 at 11:15am

WHY SMART PEOPLE ARE STUPID

Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 09:41 AM | Permalink 

Comment by Neal on June 13, 2012 at 11:13am

I don't think it applies to getting old, I think it applies to being happy at any age. 

Comment by Michel on June 13, 2012 at 9:39am

Well, I've never heard of that: young people heeding what the old say about getting old...

Comment by Adriana on June 13, 2012 at 9:19am

Yes, I agree, it should be its own discussion. It could be useful for young people to realize what will happen if they don't learn to move on. 

Comment by Neal on June 13, 2012 at 9:13am

That should be a discussion so I can find it. I've seen this in my own family, some are happy as they age, some fight depression. And though only a personal observation, those that are depressed are the ones who hold onto ever horrid event or loss; they never move on.

Comment by Adriana on June 13, 2012 at 7:40am

I couldn't agree more! Those "if only" thoughts need to be combated like the plague. Unfortunately I have people very dear to my heart who can't let go of past "missed opportunities" or even past unlucky turns and by constantly dwelling on them, and bringing them back, they make their lives miserable. We can't change the past, we need to learn to live with what we have, and love what we have, focus on the positive aspects of our lives.

Comment by doone on June 13, 2012 at 6:48am

HOW TO AGE WELL

From Scientific American:

The poem “Maud Muller” by John Greenleaf Whittier aptly ends with the line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” What if you had gone for the risky investment that you later found out made someone else rich, or if you had had the guts to ask that certain someone to marry you? Certainly, we’ve all had instances in our lives where hindsight makes us regret not sticking our neck out a bit more. But new research suggests that when we are older these kinds of ‘if only!’ thoughts about the choices we made may not be so good for ourmental health. One of the most important determinants of our emotional well being in our golden years might be whether we learn to stop worrying about what might have been.

In a new paper published in Science, researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, report evidence from two experiments which suggest that one key to aging well might involve learning to let go of regrets about missed opportunities. Stafanie Brassen and her colleagues looked at how healthy young participants (mean age: 25.4 years), healthy older participants (65.8 years), and older participants who had developed depression for the first time later in life (65.6 years) dealt with regret, and found that the young and older depressed patients seemed to hold on to regrets about missed opportunities while the healthy older participants seemed to let them go.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:19 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on June 12, 2012 at 7:02pm

The Brains Of Liars, Ctd

Alex Knapp warns against over-interpreting this research:

[W]hile there may be a correlation between pathological lying and more white matter in the prefrontal cortex, it doesn’t necessarily follow that more white matter is the cause of pathological lying. In fact, the opposite could be true. Thanks to the plasticity of the brain, it may well be that the practice of frequently lying causes underlying structural changes in the brain.

Comment by doone on June 11, 2012 at 9:38am

The Brains Of Liars

Are wired differently:

One experiment measured the brain structure of pathological liars, and compared it to normal controls — more specifically, the ratio of gray matter (the neural tissue that makes up the bulk of our brains) to white matter (the wiring that connects those brain cells). Liars, it turned out, had 14% less gray matter than the controls but had 22-26% more white matter in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that they were more likely to make connections between different memories and ideas as increased connectivity means greater access to the reserve of associations and memories stored in gray matter. “Intelligence,” it turned out, wasn’t correlated with dishonesty — but creativity, which we already know is all about connecting things, was.

Comment by doone on June 10, 2012 at 11:21am

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• …
• 78
• Next ›
• Page