What things will you do this week, not because you particularly want to, but because you feel you have to? For many people, this probably includes everything work related, from waking up early in the morning, to gritting teeth through a rush hour commute, to trying to stay awake through a particularly torturous meeting. Whatever…
Any woman starting on a birth control pill is warned about some of the physical and emotional effects of those additional hormones floating around in your bloodstream: weight gain. mood swings. acne. headaches. If you’ve followed along popular science reports, you may even have heard that being on the pill could change what kind of person…
Judging by my nephew’s sugar-coated face and chocolate-covered hands this weekend, Valentine’s Day is quickly catching up with Halloween as a candy-focused holiday for the young (for the older and frugal of us, the days after the holiday are the best time to indulge). To mark the celebration, let’s look back at the chocolate and sugar themed…
The news this week has heavily featured Brian Williams, and not because he’s been anchoring the NBC newscast. He said that he was in a helicopter hit by an RPG, but other soldiers present said he wasn’t. Scandal has erupted, currently leading to a 6-month suspension and possibly ultimately ending his career. The furor seems…
As a cognitive psychologist, I am naturally drawn to the potential beneficial impacts of mindfulness on the mind and brain: The possibility of fostering better attention, of improving children’s self-regulation, of wiring the brain in more sensible ways than the barrage of Internet and smartphone chatter will. But in the political mayhem of election season,…
This was one of my very first blog posts on Contemplating Cognition, originally published September 13, 2012. The Chinese Room continues to be one of my favorite philosophical puzzles. Human beings see minds everywhere. In one classic experiment, Heider and Simmel showed people simple animated shapes and asked people to describe the events afterward. Most…
Sometimes, writing about how meditation changes the brain feels just like a certain classic Far Side cartoon: a complex science or math problem is being solved, with an impressive opening salvo and a promising conclusion, but a certain fuzziness about an intermediate step where “a miracle occurs”. A professor colleague and I have dubbed this…
This is the final entry of a three-part series of blog entries based on a series of three articles in which two teams of researchers go back and forth on what they think is the influence of time on day on our decisions. You can refresh on the original study here, and the counterargument that…
This is Part II of a series of three blog entries, based on a series of three articles in which two teams of researchers go back and forth on what they think is the influence of time on day on our decisions. Part I was posted last Thursday, and Part III will be posted this…
As tempting as it can be to dismiss the fanciful sounding ideas of “the power of a positive attitude”, every now and then a scientific study will show that positive emotions reach into unexpected corners of our brains to tweak our thoughts and actions in small yet significant ways. As one example, simply being joyful or…
A year or so ago, you might have encountered advice on the news sites to trust others more in the morning, because as the day wears on people become more inclined to lie, cheat, or steal. (Forbes was one place that peddled this particular tidbit ). This idea may not be back in the news now,…
An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but will a bad mood a day bring the doctor running? Perhaps, but it may depend on what your culture thinks about bad moods. When bad moods are as severe as clinical depression, the health effects can include heart disease and other pains, and the damage…
Pressing Ctrl-S is a reflex for me, born in the heyday of the Blue Screen of Death and activated every few sentences of text, or every few words in the case of some of my more laborious college term papers. Though it’s far less necessary with today’s more stable technology, I still consider it a…
One of the greatest challenges to the scientific study of mindfulness is finding a way to objectively measure how mindful someone is. Only with a clear, unbiased measure we can we feel confident in when and why a person’s mindfulness changes, and what greater levels of mindfulness can mean for us. But mindfulness is a…
Once again, the thoughts of the nation are turning toward New Year’s resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking, eat healthy, save money. Statistically speaking, about a third of people are going to slip up on those resolutions before the end of the month (and anecdotally speaking, I will be one of them). So once again, the…
contemplating cognition 