fitness

01Feb10

Talking about “the last mile”, Sendhil Mullainathan, looks at how some of mental models stop us thinking rationally.

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Tags: anthropology, brain, choice, dilemma, economics, emotion, happiness, illusion, mind, neurology, paradox, perception, psychology, Sendhil Mullainathan, TED, video, zemblanity

negativity bias

21Jun09

See Nancy Etcoff on “the surprising science of happiness”. One small thing that exemplify the negativity bias that she talks about is that we can detect sweetness at 1 part per 200. We can detect bitterness at 1 part per 2 million! This could stand for all the ways we are more sensitive to the [...]

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Tags: bias, brain, choice, emotion, Etcoff, happiness, mind, psychology

Marshmallows revisited…

21May09

Pink and White Marshmallows, originally uploaded by Craig Jewell. “TED has reached 100,000 Facebook fans today! Thank you, TEDsters — Here is the premiere of Joachim de Posada’s talk “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow” exclusively for you. Please enjoy the high-definition talk from TED U 2009.” Update: Now it’s on the TED site:

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Tags: choice, gratification, happiness, marshmallow, psychology

prisoner’s dilemma

10May09

It’s kind of magic, the prisoner’s dilemma. It gets you thingking about how people relate and why (although some people I know don’t like it). Here’s one version. You and your partner either Co-operate or you Defect. You both co-operate -> you get two each. You Defect while he co-operates -> you get three, he [...]

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Tags: anthropology, brain, dilemma, happiness, logic, mind, morals, paradox, prisoner, psychology, zemblanity

marshmallows

19Mar09

The BBC has revisited Walter Mischel’s “marshmallow” experiments: If you’re in Britain you can watch it for a while here. Outside, and later, see an excerpt here. Jonathan Haidt refers to it in the chapter one of The Happiness Hypothesis: Imagine that it is 1970 and you are a four-year-old child in an experiment being [...]

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Tags: brain, choice, gratification, Haidt, happiness, marshmallow, mind, Mischel, psychology

choice

10Mar09

Barry Schwartz on the problem of choice and shopping for jeans: My interest in the problem began when I went to replace my jeans at The Gap. I do that as infrequently as I possibly can. I dislike shopping in general but I especially hate to shop for jeans. So I went in and I [...]

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Tags: choice, happiness, mind, paradox, psychology, Schwartz, TED, video, zemblanity

more/better

10Mar09

That paradox, more is not necessarily better, has been with us for a long time. One of the earliest Greek writers, Hesiod said, “They do not know the half is better than the whole.” Prophets and philosophers the world over have spoken about it in all sorts of ways. Myths, from Midas to the Chaucer’s [...]

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Tags: brain, choice, Gilbert, happiness, illusion, mind, paradox, psychology, TED, video, zemblanity

split brain confabulation

02Mar09

Reading Chapter One of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis (online here) there is mention of confabulation, which I’d read  about in Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (Reith lectures here) – (He was working with people who had had the connection between the two halves of the brain cut) “When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to [...]

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Tags: brain, confabulation, Gazzaniga, Haidt, happiness, mind, neurology, psychology