Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”

{ Physorg | Continue reading }

illustration { Joshua Petker }

The area immediately inside the entrance of a supermarket is known as the “decompression zone”. People need to slow down and take stock of the surroundings, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this area is a bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion.

Immediately to the left in Sainsbury’s is another familiar sight: a “chill zone” for browsing magazines, books and DVDs, tempting impromptu purchases and slowing customers down. But those on a serious mission will keep walking ahead—and the first thing they come to is the fresh fruit and vegetables section.

For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But psychology is at work here: selecting good wholesome fresh food is an uplifting way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the stodgy stuff later on.

Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards the back of a store to provide more opportunity to tempt customers. This is why pharmacies are generally at the rear, even in “convenience” stores. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost “dwell time”: the length of time people spend in a store.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

Buffett then told the crowd a story about a 19th-century bill in the state of Indiana that sought to “change” the value of pi.

“It seems there was a fellow who discovered some new relationship between circumference and diameter that would help students learn a better kind of geometry, so he wrote a law to change the value of pi from 3.14159 etc. to 3.20. It passed the Indiana house — until the Indiana senate finally thought better of it.”

After the audience stopped laughing, Buffett came to his point about options, “The U.S. Senate concluded that the world was flat, because their contributors paid them enough to say the world was flat.”

Then Munger weighed in: “It’s worse than that. Those people who wanted to round pi to 3.2 were stupid. These people [the opponents of expensing options] are worse than stupid. They know it’s wrong and want to do it anyway.”

{ CNN/Money | Continue reading }

illustration { Andy Warhol, Eggs, 1982 }

{ george costanza high score, 860,630 points }

In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they’ve found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a “round” or “waggle” dance, on a specialized “dance floor” in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they’ve found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Honey bees perform a particular figure-eight dance on their return to the hive, known as waggle dance.

By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

All of the known species and races of honey bees exhibit the behavior. There is no evidence that this form of communication depends on individual learning.

In 1947, Karl von Frisch correlated the runs and turns of the dance to the distance and direction of the food source from the hive. The orientation of the dance correlates to the relative position of the sun, and the length of the waggle portion of the run is correlated to the distance from the hive.

{ Continue reading }

Mega-orgy in Tel Aviv cancelled due to public pressure. (…) The orgy was organized by the Raelian movement, a UFO religion whose followers believe humankind was created by aliens [and claimed to have created the first human clone.] “The purpose of the event was to try and bring world peace through mass orgasm.”

{ Ynet News | Continue reading }

Police in Finland believe they have caught a car-thief thanks to a DNA sample taken from a sample of his blood found inside a mosquito.

Last June a car was stolen in Lapua, some 380 kilometres (235 miles) north of Helsinki. It was soon found near a railway station in Seinaejoki, about 25 kilometres from where it was stolen.

“A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood. It was sent to the laboratory for testing, which showed the blood belonged to a man who was in the police registers,” inspector Sakari Palomaeki told AFP.

The suspect, who has been interrogated, has insisted he did not steal the car, saying he had hitchhiked and was given a lift by a man driving the car.

{ AFP/Yahoo | Continue reading }

Sexual “numbness.” Lack of libido. Arousal that stalls.

Such sexual symptoms have long been known side effects of the popular Prozac class of antidepressants, but a growing body of research suggests that they are far more common than previously thought, perhaps affecting half or more of patients.

And a handful of recent medical and psychological journal articles document a small number of cases in which sexual problems remain even after a patient goes off the drugs. (…)

In fact, the dampening sexual effects can be so dramatic that in recent years, the antidepressants have become the leading treatment for premature ejaculation, a study last year found, though they are not approved for that use by the FDA.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

{ 4th Estate }

{ John LeKay, Yin and Yang #1, 1990 }

{ Damien Hirst, The Virgin Mother, 2005 }

LeKay, who claims to have been a friend of Hirst’s between 1992 and 1994, and who shared a mixed show with him in New York in 1994, said: “I gave Damien a marked-up duplicate copy of the catalogue. You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece. I gave him the catalogue to help him find butterflies.”

{ Times | Continue reading }

related { Has Hirst’s bubble burst? }

Scientists are closer to understanding why alcohol turns some people into violent yobs -while others are more likely to fall asleep at the bar.

Researchers have discovered a genetic mutation which increases aggression and impulsiveness in drinkers.

Dr Roope Tikkanen, one of the researchers from Helsinki University Central Hospital in Finland, said that alcoholism, alcohol consumption and violence were closely related.

‘People react quite differently to acute alcohol exposure,’ he said.

‘Most individuals become relaxed and talkative, while some - particularly persons who are introverted while sober - become expansively extroverted and aggressive.’

Alcohol was found to increase the risk of impulsive violence among men born with a highly active version of a gene which produces the substance monoamine oxidase A, the researchers found.

{ DailyMail | Continue reading }

illustration { Mike Giant }

In Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, The Discomfort Zone (highly recommended), I found a nice couple of paragraphs dwelling on the psychology of cartoon faces.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly substract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brain, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and - simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line - Charlie Brown.

{ Cognition and Culture Institute | Continue reading }

Dollar signs for eyes – cartoonists have been drawing them for years, and the artists, while whimsical, may have been onto something. According to new research from UC San Diego, areas of the brain responsible for vision respond more strongly to objects of value.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }