Fear, our primal response to danger, is part of what has kept the human race alive. But our capacity to imagine the future… “the worst case scenario”… can also turn it pathological. From The New York Times: This simple distinction between anxiety and fear is an important one in the task of defining and...
From the Dana Foundation: Simply stated, clinical trial data on antidepressants, similar to that for many other classes of drugs, including most cancer and anti-inflammatory drugs, have never shown that more than 60 to 70 percent of patients in any given study improve. And, in many studies, improvement on a placebo (so-called sugar pill...
How Social Neuroscience Is Uncovering the Biology of Human Interactions It turns out that your social network doesn’t just affect how you think — it literally rewires your brain in ways you can’t even imagine. Yet another reason to pick your friends wisely! Not long ago, scientists thought that social factors were relatively unimportant...
It’s January again — the time of New Year’s resolutions, annual planning, etc. — in a word: goals. Life is a list of goals. Personal and professional aspirations motivate us to act every day in order to attain a result that will put us ahead in the game of life. Maybe you want to...
This image was Selin Jessa’s entry in the 2010 Positive Posters International Poster Competition. Here’s her description: Consider that technically, the glass is completely full – half of air and half of water. Just as you can perceive a glass of water in different ways, I think we need to take a moment and...
A recent article at The Dana Foundation looks at the seeming paradox of ADHD: Despite its moniker, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) might be better considered as a problem in the willful control of attention as opposed to a pure deficit in the ability to pay attention. That distinction, supported by a growing body of...
Discovery.com reports that researchers at the University of Manchester have developed a mathematically optimal formula for the perfect handshake, based on 12 key measures, including vigor, eye contact and hand temperature. "The human handshake is one of the most crucial elements of impression formation and is used as a source of information for making...
In a new article at The Dana Foundation, Stanford professor Henry T. Greely looks at the social and legal ramifications of cognitive-enhancing drugs. I’m particularly intrigued by his argument that “cheating” is not a valid concern: Many people find the assertion that enhancement is cheating to be convincing. Sometimes it is: If rules or...
According to the latest research, “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” may be a misnomer. It seems that the problem is not a deficit of attention, but a matter of allocation: Many children diagnosed with ADHD can focus well on tasks that are interesting to them, but wander during a class, for example, distracted by other signals in...
From The DANA Foundation: Is one long slumber enough to restore you to full alertness after many nights of insufficient sleep? Not according to a new study from Harvard researchers, who found that chronic sleep loss impairs alertness in ways that even a ten-hour sleep can’t fix. “When people try to determine whether they...
