We all need to give ourselves mental breaks, but we also need to focus and not let email notifications, Twitter notifications, suck our attention.
We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle.
We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle.
Your brain learns to block out the noises that it hears all the time.
Maria Konnikova: the good news is that you can become more creative and I think that everyone has a certain degree of creativity in them.
Heavy multitaskers become worse at the very thing that they should be very good at.
You can learn to argue with yourself. That’s actually how I get a lot of my thinking done.
For whatever reason being in nature helps people become better at problem solving.
Experts should trust all of their instincts and their common sense in their areas of expertise. The problem comes when non-experts have "common sense opinion" that really is just coming out of nowhere.
Today marks my last blog for Artful Choice. It has been an exciting year of writing about decisions small and big and the forces that help shape them and make […]
From an evolutionary perspective, our quickness to judge faces certainly makes sense. We need to know if someone is friend or foe, if he is strong or weak, if we can trust him or not. And we need to know quickly, before something bad happens. But is that quickness still as good when it determines national political outcomes?
The crowd surges around you, lurching forward in one overpowering swell. There’s panting and shoving, sharp elbows and raised voices, clawing and tearing, frenzied looks and frazzled nerves. Light blaring […]
Can we be aware without actually paying attention? In other words, can our brains somehow imbibe visual information from the outside world without any conscious effort on our part? It […]
It is remarkably easy to report false-positive findings, or results that support an effect that, in reality, does not (or may not) exist.
The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will.
As we make sense of the world around us, our minds often take shortcuts, generalizing, cutting corners, making connections and engaging in inferences as they integrate all of the incoming […]
In most circumstances, narcissism doesn’t go over well. But there’s one big exception to the rule: leadership.
This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership […]
Today, I don’t want to write about Kahneman’s work or his invaluable contribution to the study of decision making and the workings of the human mind, but rather, about something much more general: his approach to research.
When we habituate to something, our physical and psychological response becomes so used to it that whatever the “it” is stops being arousing.
