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."