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."