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18 Oct 09

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph

  • A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.
  • I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
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Emory University | Atlanta, GA | Busting Psychology Myths

  • If you believe that opposites attract, that most people use only 10 percent of their brains, and that handwriting can reveal your personality, then you need to check out Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld's latest book, "50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior."
    • Subliminal messages can persuade people to purchase products
    • Playing Mozart to infants boosts their intelligence
    • Hypnosis is useful for retrieving memories of forgotten events
    • The defining feature of dyslexia is reversing letters
    • Researchers have demonstrated that dreams possess symbolic meaning
    • Low self-esteem is a major cause of psychological problems

Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them. | Derek Sivers

  • Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.



    Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

  • Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.



    Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

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07 Aug 08

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

  • Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
  • SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
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30 Jul 07

Howstuffworks "How Swearing Works"

  • But swearwords aren't quite as simple as they seem. They're paradoxical -- saying them is taboo in nearly every culture, but instead of avoiding them as with other taboos, people use them. Most associate swearing with being angry or frustrated, but people swear for a number of reasons and in a variety of situations. Swearing also serves multiple purposes in social interactions. Not only that, your brain treats swear words differently than it treats other words.
  • Virtually every language in every culture in the world has its own unique swearwords. Even different dialects of the same language can have different expletives. The very first languages probably included swearwords, but since writing evolved after speaking did, there's no record of who said the first swearword or what that word was. Because of the taboos surrounding it, written language histories also include few records of the origins of swearing. Even today, many dictionaries don't include profanity, and comparatively few studies have examined swearing.
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