Medical myths -- Vreeman and Carroll 335 (7633): 1288 -- BMJ

Medical myths - Part 2

1. People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
2. We use only 10% of our brains
3. Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
4. Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
5. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
6. Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
7. Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals

Festive medical myths -- Vreeman and Carroll 337: a2769 -- BMJ

Festive medical myths - Part 1

1. Sugar causes hyperactivity in children
2. Suicides increase over the holidays
3. Poinsettia toxicity
4. Excess heat loss in the hatless
5. Nocturnal feasting makes you fat
6. You can cure a hangover

Biases

I chapter one of Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein list the following biases:

1) Anchoring - our tendency to answer questions by finding an anchor and adjusting our answer.
2) Availability Bias
3) Representativeness
4) Optimism and Overconfidence
5) Loss aversion
6) Status Quo Bias
7) Framing

Scientists debunk myth that most heat is lost through head | Science | The Guardian

Scientists debunk myth that most heat is lost through head | Science | The Guardian

"The face, head and chest are more sensitive to changes in temperature than the rest of the body, making it feel as if covering them up does more to prevent heat loss. In fact, covering one part of the body has as much effect as covering any other."

"Another myth exposed by the study was that sugar makes children hyperactive. At least a dozen high-quality studies have investigated the possibility of a link between children's behaviour and sugar intake, but none has found any difference between children who consumed a lot and those who did not."

Raising the World’s I.Q.

Op-Ed Columnist - Raising the World’s I.Q. - NYTimes.com: apparently it requires iodized salt. Who knew?

Extract from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius? | Books | The Guardian

Extract from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius? | Books | The Guardian: "The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any 'naturals' - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find 'grinds', people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."

Top 10 Myths About The Common Cold - The List Universe

Top 10 Myths About The Common Cold - The List Universe

Phys Ed - Stretching - The Truth - NYTimes.com

Phys Ed - Stretching - The Truth - NYTimes.com Static stretching now considered harmful.

Gut Bacteria May Cause And Fight Disease, Obesity : NPR

Gut Bacteria May Cause And Fight Disease, Obesity : NPR: "if you find bacteria which are responsible for diseases — and you can include obesity in this — you can then target them to reduce the risk of that disease."

Money As Debt

Yet more evidence that the world does not work the way you think it does. Money As Debt explains the
Fractional Reserve Banking System. I had no idea but it sure explains why the credit crunch is so potentially devastating to the economy.

Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord - washingtonpost.com

Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord - washingtonpost.com: "Men are more likely to be devoted and loyal husbands when they lack a particular variant of a gene that influences brain activity"

Bad Science � Think yourself thin…

Bad Science � Think yourself thin…: "Their health, measured by things like weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure, was related to their perceived amount of exercise, rather than the actual amount of exercise they got"

Peter Donnelly shows how stats fool juries | Video on TED.com

Peter Donnelly shows how stats fool juries | Video on TED.com

Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers | Psychology Today Blogs

Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers | Psychology Today Blogs: "like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective adults."

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn: Scientific American

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn: Scientific American: "Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world."

Physiognomy and success | Face value | Economist.com

Physiognomy and success | Face value | Economist.com: "What the boss looks like determines how he performs"

The Frontal Cortex : Rational Voters?

The Frontal Cortex : Rational Voters?: "they assume that my political preferences reflect some mixture of ideology and selfish calculation. I'll vote for the guy who best matches my geopolitics and tax bracket.

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren't rational: we're rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences."

Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.

Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes. - NYTimes.com: "Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways... 'When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,' Dr. Bodenhausen said. 'A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.'"

Psychology Today: The Smell of Love

Psychology Today: The Smell of Love: It was found, by Wedekind and his team, that how women rate a man's body odor pleasantness and sexiness depends upon how much of their MHC profile is shared. Overall, women prefer those scents exuded by men whose MHC profiles varied the most from their own. Hence, any given man's odor could be pleasingly alluring to one woman, yet an offensive turnoff to another.

ABC News: Feel Powerless? Buy Something

ABC News: Feel Powerless? Buy Something: "The study, published in the current edition of the Journal of Consumer Research, contends that when the boss puts you down, you feel so robbed of power that you're more likely to go out and buy yourself some status symbol."

The Itch - Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

The New Yorker:
"Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference."

The Situation of Sight � The Situationist

The Situation of Sight � The Situationist: "What we see, what we hear, feel and what we think we know is not a photographic reflection of the world, but an instantaneous unthinking calculation as to what is the most useful way of seeing the world."

Travel Insurance - Magical Thinking - Appeasing the Gods, With Insurance - John Tierney - New York Times

Travel Insurance - Magical Thinking - Appeasing the Gods, With Insurance - John Tierney - New York Times: "We buy insurance not just for peace of mind or to protect ourselves financially, but because we share the ancient Greeks’ instinct for appeasing the gods."

Are Conservatives Stupid or Evil? | Psychology Today Blogs

Are Conservatives Stupid or Evil? | Psychology Today Blogs: "psychologist Jonathan Haidt reports that conservatives are deeply concerned about factors that fall outside of liberal morality. For liberals, morality is pretty much about harm and justice. To decide whether a policy is wrong, they want to know whether any one will be hurt by it and whether it will be fair to all those affected. Conservative care about harm and justice too, but they also care about three things that liberals tend to ignore: purity, respect for authority, and loyalty to the ingroup."

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times: "The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task."

Overcoming Bias: Cash Increases Accuracy

Overcoming Bias: Cash Increases Accuracy: "stronger incentives often (though not always) make us see more clearly"

Tournament Theory

The Logic of Life: Tournament theory appears to be the best explanation for the characteristics of office life. Life sports tournaments, workers compete against each other for limited rewards. One obvious outcome is that employees undermine their peers. Less obviously, luck is rewarded more heavily than skill. This also explains the large pay packets of upper management. They are paid not for their contribution but as an incentive to those underneath them to work hard.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON JAZZ: RESEARCHERS USE MRI TO STUDY SPONTANEITY, CREATIVITY

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON JAZZ: RESEARCHERS USE MRI TO STUDY SPONTANEITY, CREATIVITY: "A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow."

Chris Blattman's Blog: The other resource curse: Oil and women’s rights

Chris Blattman's Blog: The other resource curse: Oil and women’s rights: "women’s participation in the formal labor force is a driving force in the development of women’s rights and participation. Oil production tends to crowd out local manufacturing, and so oil crowds out job opportunities for women. That is, the discovery of oil in a less developed country, he argues, sideswipes the development of women’s rights. The discovery of oil might even set back previous gains.

It gets more interesting. If you ignore oil, Islam tends to be associated (statistically) with poor women’s rights. After accounting for oil, that Islam-women’s rights correlation goes away. Variation in oil production seems to explain much of the variation in women’s rights within the Middle East, as well as between the Middle East and the rest of the world."

When people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions, study finds

When people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions, study finds: "Don’t bother trying to persuade your boss of a new idea while he’s feeling the power of his position – new research suggests he’s not listening to you. “Powerful people have confidence in what they are thinking. Whether their thoughts are positive or negative toward an idea, that position is going to be hard to change,” said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University."

More Expensive Placebos Bring More Relief - New York Times

More Expensive Placebos Bring More Relief - New York Times: "A $2.50 placebo, [researchers] have found, works better one that costs 10 cents.

The finding may explain the popularity of some high-cost drugs over cheaper alternatives, the authors conclude. It may also help account for patients’ reports that generic drugs are less effective than brand-name ones, though their active ingredients are identical."

The Situation of Perceptions

The Situation of Perceptions: "The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines."

"People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so."

THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL FORCES: EVIDENCE FROM THE BEHAVIOR OF FOOTBALL REFEREES

THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL FORCES: EVIDENCE FROM THE BEHAVIOR OF FOOTBALL REFEREES: "Analyzing the neutrality of referees during 12 German premier league (1. Bundesliga) soccer seasons, this paper documents evidence that social forces influence agents’ decisions. Referees, who are appointed to be impartial, tend to favor the home team by systematically awarding more stoppage time in close matches in which the home team is behind. They also favor the home team in decisions to award goals and penalty kicks. Crowd composition affects the size and the direction of the bias, and the crowd’s proximity to the field is related to the quality of refereeing."

The New Yorker Annals of Science: Numbers Guy

New Yorker Annals of Science: "researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general"

"When we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this."

"Subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers if they held the response key in their left hand."

"Six-month-old babies, exposed simultaneously to images of common objects and sequences of drumbeats, consistently gaze longer at the collection of objects that matches the number of drumbeats. By now, it is generally agreed that infants come equipped with a rudimentary ability to perceive and represent number."

"Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent."

Seeing Faces

Seeing Faces � The Situationist: "It’s amazing how little it takes for people to see a face –a tendency so strong that it has been given a name, pareidolia."

The Hawthorne Effect

Overcoming Bias: The Hawthorne Effect: "If you took a psychology class in college, you may have run across the so-called “Hawthorne Effect,” which is discussed in many college textbooks (see page 31 of this extensive survey from 2004) and is still cited in various studies. But the original studies that gave the “Hawthorne Effect” its name have long been discredited, and textbooks don’t always give you the full details."

Consistency Bias Warps Our Personal and Political Memories

PsyBlog: How the Consistency Bias Warps Our Personal and Political Memories: "consistency bias ... is the finding that we will often reconstruct the past to make it more compatible with our current worldview."

"The consistency bias is only one of the many types of biases that our memories demonstrate. Here are a few more examples:
* Beneffectance: we tend to believe the past glories were the result of our actions, while past disgraces were someone else's fault.
* Reminiscence bump: the fascinating finding that we remember more events from our adolescence and early adulthood than from other periods of our lives.
* Hindsight bias: that we tend to think that we could easily have predicted past events when in fact we can't.
* Rose-tinted specs: remember how wonderful things were in the olden days? It wasn't that good, trust me, nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute

PsyBlog: Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute: "studies show that the blind's other senses are not more acute, but they can learn some amazing skills to compensate."