Category: Life

The Science of Sarcasm

Katherine P. Rankin, a Neuropsychologist, Studies Sarcasm – NYTimes.com
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

“The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.”

Pessimist? Be A Lawyer

Science Journal – WSJ.com
Optimists, the Duke finance scholars discovered, worked longer hours every week, expected to retire later in life, were less likely to smoke and, when they divorced, were more likely to remarry. They also saved more, had more of their wealth in liquid assets, invested more in individual stocks and paid credit-card bills more promptly.

Yet those who saw the future too brightly — people who in the survey overestimated their own likely lifespan by 20 years or more — behaved in just the opposite way, the researchers discovered. Rather than save, they squandered. They postponed bill-paying. Instead of taking the long view, they barely looked past tomorrow.

Surveying law students at the University of Virginia, he found that pessimists got better grades, were more likely to make law review and, upon graduation, received better job offers. There was no scientific reason. “In law,” he said, “pessimism is considered prudence.” The most widely held profession, of those elected to serve us in Washington, is the Legal profession. We are being governed by a bunch of Pessimists. If you expect the worst in everyone, then you’ll legislate accordingly. So if Optimists “saved more”, then you would expect increasing deficits from Pessimists? No wonder us Optimists give Congress such a dismal approval rating.

How We Fool Ourselves

Forer effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. The Forer effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as many types of personality tests.

A related and more generic phenomenon effect is that of subjective validation (Marks, 2000, p. 41). Subjective validation occurs when two unrelated or even random events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectancy, or hypothesis demands a relationship. Thus people seek a correspondence between their perception of their personality and the contents of a horoscope.

Kids’ Food Fussiness May Be Inherited

Kids’ Food Fussiness May Be Inherited – Forbes.com
Wardle said food preferences appear to be “as inheritable a physical characteristic as height.”

Unlike nearly every other phobia, neophobia is a normal stage of human development.Scientists theorize that it was originally an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect children from accidentally eating dangerous things – like poisonous berries or mushrooms.

Neophobia typically kicks in at age 2 or 3, when children are newly mobile and capable of disappearing from their parents’ sight within seconds. Being unwilling to eat new things they stumble upon may turn out to be a lifesaver. While most children grow out of the food fussiness by age 5, not all do. For parents of particularly picky eaters, experts encourage them not to cave in when their children throw food tantrums

Are We Failing Our Geniuses?

Are We Failing Our Geniuses? – TIME
To some extent, complacency is built into the system. American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

Powerball wife out of jail

Daily Independent (Ashland, KY) – Powerball wife out of jail
The wife of Powerball winner David Edwards was released from the Boyd County Detention Center on Wednesday, under the condition that she pay the $17,000 she owes in child support.

Shawna Edwards, 32, has been in the county jail for nearly a month after she was arrested on a warrant charging her with failing to make child support payments on two children she had previous to her marriage to David Edwards. She also served 10 days in jail for giving police officers a false name when she was arrested. Thanks to Melinda for sending us this one. Continue reading “Powerball wife out of jail”

Powerball Winner’s Belongings To Be Auctioned

Spoils for sale: Lottery winner’s belongings go on the block
Can you believe this story appears on Friday the 13th? In November 2005, he was charged with possession of cocaine and heroin. Edwards pleaded guilty to possession of narcotics paraphernalia, a first-degree misdemeanor, and the cocaine charge was dropped.

A court hearing is scheduled July 24 to determine the status of the heroin charge, according to the state attorney’s office.

Last July, Edwards’ $1.2 million home was auctioned for $400,000.

And Saturday, much of the home’s contents will go on the auction block at a Riviera Beach warehouse where Edwards spent his final days in Palm Beach County. Continue reading “Powerball Winner’s Belongings To Be Auctioned”

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygymy creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser. Continue reading “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature”

Exercise Away Depression

Exercise stimulates the formation of new brain cells
Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells. Continue reading “Exercise Away Depression”