The Octopus Brain [video]

The Wisdom of Pessimism [video]

Eating Popcorn In The Cinema Makes People Immune To Advertising

According to TheGuardian –

Eating popcorn in the cinema may be irritating not just for fellow movie goers, but for advertisers: a group of researchers from Cologne University has concluded that chewing makes us immune to film advertising. The reason why adverts manage to imprint brand names on our brains is that our lips and the tongue automatically simulate the pronunciation of a new name when we first hear it. Every time we re-encounter the name, our mouth subconsciously practises its pronunciation. However, according to the study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, this “inner speech” can be disturbed by chewing, rendering the repetition effect redundant.

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Mondays Aren’t So Bad, But Weekends Are Better

The BBC reports –

We may say we hate Mondays, but research suggests Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are equally loathed. US investigators who looked at a poll of 340,000 people found moods were no worse on Mondays than other working days, bar Friday. People were happier as they approached the weekend, lending support for the concept of “that Friday feeling”. The report authors told the Journal of Positive Psychology that the concept of miserable Mondays should be ditched.

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Night Owls Smarter Than Early Birds

This report from PsychologyToday makes complete sense to me.

Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late. A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. In a new paper, Kanazawa replicates the finding and provides a theoretical grounding. Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts.

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