This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
-Douglas Adams

In what will come as no surprise to the men reading this, it turns out you really do have a decline in brain function when you’re talking to a beautiful girl (or, at least a girl you think is beautiful).

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive. The reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or ‘cognitive resources’ trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

Most guys will be able to relate to this study. Remember the last time you were out with friends and you saw a pretty girl from across the room? Maybe you decided not to go talk to her because you couldn’t think of anything to say. Maybe a pretty girl approached you to ask you something, and you just sat there with a blank stare on your face. You might think it’s your fault, but really it’s just your brain jumping into reproductive mode.

Each man performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last. The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to female members of the research team before repeating the test.

The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.

All you have to do is convince yourself the girl isn’t really that pretty, then maybe your brain won’t stumble over itself trying to impress her.

The abstract concept of importance is grounded in bodily experiences of weight.

What?

It turns out the weight of objects we interact with everyday actually affects how important we think that object might be. For example, let’s say you have two un-marked boxes with different objects hidden inside each box. One box weights 20 pounds, and other other box weights just 5 pounds, and you have to decide which box contains “more important” stuff. Naturally, you would probably think the heavier box is more important, but why?

Jostmann reasons that the link between weight and importance is rooted in our early childhood experiences, when we rapidly learn that heavy objects require more effort to deal with, not just in terms of strength but planning too. Our brain relies on these concrete physical experiences when it represents more abstract concepts, like importance. The two are then joined, so that physical experiences can affect abstract thought.

Have you ever smelled something, and been reminded of a person you knew or an event that happened years (even decades) ago? The same concept holds true here. Your brain has been associating heavier objects with “being important” for your entire life, whether you’re aware of it or not. This means as an adult, you might be subconsciously giving certain things preferential treatment based solely on the weight of that object.

A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard. In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

What they are showing here is that, even though foreign money was the primary focus of this experiment, the clipboards were actually responsible for influencing their thoughts about the importance of foreign currency. Basically, the weight of a clipboard (object B) will change how they feel about about foreign money (object A).

Some people think apologizing is a sign of weakness. In fact, it’s the weak and the scared who are too insecure to apologize.

Did you know doctors who are willing to apologize to their patients for their mistakes are sued for malpractice about half as much as doctors who aren’t willing to apologize. And after the massacres in Rwanda, these murderers stood up and said “I’m sorry for killing your entire family”. And most of the time, simply saying “I’m sorry” was enough. That’s the power of an apology.

Arrogance, and the mindset of thinking you’re always right and you have nothing to apologize for is a dangerous place to be. An apology isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of respect and maturity, even among the most arrogant people in this world.

The same holds true for countries, not just people. No nation in the history of Earth has been perfect, not even America. But some Americans believe that apologizing for our history will make the USA look weak to the rest of the world, when really it only makes America look weak to THEM, because they’re scared.

“President X can apologize for himself, but don’t apologize for me or for America because I have nothing to be sorry for”. But you’re part of this country too, just like I am and just like President X is. While you and I weren’t personally involved in slavery or killing the Indians or putting Japanese-Americans into internment camps, it’s a part of our history because it’s a part of American’s history. We might have rationalized doing these things out of fear, but fear is not a valid excuse for refusing to apologize.

Apologies can do great things and they can enable great things. And if you don’t believe I have three words for you: Make-up sex
-Bill Maher

The way you think about and handle your emotions, specifically fear, says a lot about how you perceive time.

People with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them.

So what’s the difference. Think of it this way, pretend you have a meeting at work on Wednesday. Your boss calls you and says we’re moving the meeting forward 2 days, what day is the meeting happening on now? If you said Friday, you probably think of yourself as moving through time, if you said Monday, you think of time moving towards you.

62 student were given a version of [the work-meeting question] but they made it so the re-arranged event was either anger-provoking or neutral. On average, more students presented with the angry version said the event had been moved to Friday (as if they themselves were moving through time) than students presented with the neutral version. Moreover, the angry-version students were more likely (than the neutral students) to say that they felt as though they were approaching the event, rather than that the event was approaching them. In other words, it seems that angry thoughts can change the way we think about time.

Maybe the reverse is also true. Angry thoughts might shape the way we perceive time, but maybe our natural perception of time has a role in shaping how angry we are (or aren’t). Power and control also come into play. People who always feel the need to be in control of everything probably perceive themselves as moving through time, that way they’re in control. And yes, I do think as a result of this lifestyle, controlling people tend to be more angry.

We all know that drugs are used for many different purposes. Some drugs are used as medicine such as Ibuprofen to relieve and reduce pain. Other drugs are used in a more recreational setting like caffeine which will give you a jolt of energy, or marijuana which will relax your body and your mind. There are other things that aren’t really drugs, but they still affect your brain the same way drugs do. Have you ever heard somebody say “love is a drug”? But money, cold hard cash, is also a drug to many people.

Students came into the lab and were told they would be participating in a test of finger dexterity. One group was given a pile of Chinese currency to count. Another group was given blank pieces of paper to count. Then, some of the students were asked to put their fingers in bowls of water heated to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and rate how uncomfortable it felt. The subjects who had earlier been counting money and had their hands in the painfully hot water reported that the water didn’t feel so hot to them, compared to people who had counted slips of [blank] paper.

Who would have thought that cash could be used as a type of painkiller. But what exactly is it about cash that causes your brain to react this way? After all, money is just paper with words and colors printed on it. But we’ve been raised to think (or know) that money is a necessity to live and survive in this world.

Maybe the pain doesn’t feel as intense after counting cash because subconsciously people think if the pain gets too bad, they can trade their money to stop the pain, whereas people who had the blank paper had no “bargaining chips” and had to deal with the pain alone. This is the case with physical pain, but what about emotional pain?

As far as your brain’s concerned, money can act as a substitute for social acceptance, reducing social discomfort and, by extension, physical discomfort and even pain. We think money works as a substitute for another pain buffer — love.

After handling money but before dipping their hands in hot water, the students were asked a variety of questions involving deep emotions (like love, hate, war, sex) and were asked to describe and rank each emotion or concept. People who were handling real money ranked negative emotions, such as heartbreak, at levels a lot lower than people handling blank pieces of paper. This suggests that not only does money help reduce physical pain, it can also help reduce emotional pain to a degree. So maybe work is a good way to distract yourself and reduce the pain of a bad situation.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can reduce the pain of sadness.
-Alex Weidmann

I saw an interesting article today about how left handed people and right handed people perceive and handle the world differently. We know that the majority of the human population is right handed, but what most of us don’t know is how being right or left handed affects our life and our decisions in everyday life.

219 students from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, were told that a cartoon character loves zebras but hates pandas (or vice versa). On a paper with two boxes side by side, they had to draw a zebra in one and a panda in the other. A majority (74 percent) of left-handers drew the “good” animal in the box on the left, while most (67 percent) of the right-handers drew the good animal in the box on the right. Digging deeper into the statistics, it turns out that right-handers were nearly six times more likely than lefties to place the good animal on the right and the bad animal on the left. “Right-handers’ responses were consistent with the mental metaphor Good Is Right, and left-handers’ with the mental metaphor Good Is Left

Totally subconscious but it says a lot about human behavior. The side of our bodies that we use the most and come to rely on is the side we “trust”, and that comes into play in the real world. For example if you were at a restaurant deciding between two good dishes, one printed on the left side of the menu and one on the right side of the menu. Naturally, you probably feel most trusting of the food on the side of the menu that correlates with your dominant hand.

Casasanto showed 286 student volunteers pictures of “Fribbles” arrayed in two columns, side by side on a page. Between each pair was an instruction, such as “Circle the Fribble who looks more intelligent”—or more attractive, more honest, happier, less intelligent, less attractive, less honest, sadder. Of the participants who showed a directional preference, most left-handers (65 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the left, while most right-handers (54 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the right.

This specific study doesn’t exactly do it for me. They say “most” right-handers circled the aliens on the right side, but their data says 54% chose the right side. That’s only 5.4 people choosing the right side, and 4.6 choosing the left (statistically, not a huge difference at all). The percentage of the left handers was a little higher, but not as high as the first study.

371 volunteers read brief descriptions of products (mattresses, desk chairs, kiddie pools) on the left or right side of a page and then indicate which they’d like to buy. Again, most righties chose the product described on the right side, but most lefties—resisting whatever implicit message the righty culture conveys—chose the item on the left. And when volunteers read about two job candidates whose resumes were printed side-by-side, right-handers tended to choose the person described on the right, but left-handers chose the one on the left

Since there are more right handed people than left handed in the world, phrases knocking lefties like “two left feet” and “out in left field” stick with the left handed people among us. Meanwhile, right handed people get phrases like “my right-hand man”, “the right side of history” and “the right place at the right time”. Of course the word “right” has different meanings here, but these things can and do influence your subconscious thoughts.

So how do you see the world, “right and wrong” or “left and wrong”?