Drawing the curtains of the windows into the soul

According to William Shakespeare, eyes are the windows of the soul. This opinion was shared by Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, reflecting early Anglo-French poetic harmonization. By contrast, Neil Shubin in his book Your Inner Fish offered a slightly less ephemeral opinion: “When you look into eyes, forget about romance, creation, and the windows into the soul. With their molecules, genes, […]

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New York is to the left of Buenos Aires but only when your street cafe faces east

What’s the quickest way from the bottom of Bay Street to Eglinton and Yonge? And how about from NYU to Times Square? Or from Checkpoint Charlie to Unter den Linden? If you are familiar with Toronto, New York City, and Berlin, then you can probably answer those questions with relative ease. (Hint: don’t try to […]

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Oh! What fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh: The cognitive jingles of earworms

It’s close to Christmas. The smell of gingerbread is in the air. The Salvation Army is ringing their bells at every street corner. The sound of “Jingle Bells” is piped onto the sidewalk by your friendly neighborhood department store. “Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way. Oh! what fun it is to ride In […]

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One year of precocious baboons: More sparkling Pleiades wanted

It’s been a year since we started to roll out the Psychonomics Featured Content section. I published the first post on September 25th, 2014, but there was quite a bit of preparatory work behind the scenes that predates our public appearance, so now is a good time to proclaim “happy anniversary”, or whatever one does after a […]

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Call of Duty or Tetris? The cognitive payoff of some video games

Video games both challenge and entertain us.  We play them for fun, and the more we play the better we get.  But might the skills we develop while gaming transfer to other activities?  This has been an increasingly hot research question in recent years, with an industry of “brain training” games willing to race ahead of the science, as […]

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Pamela Anderson or Britney Spears? Experiencing your birth matters

What does Beyoncé have in common with Pamela Anderson, but not with Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie? And what is it that Britney and Angelina have in common? Apparently, Britney and Angelina gave birth to their babies by caesarian section whereas Beyoncé and Pamela gave birth naturally. This is the only thing I know about […]

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4,000 years of the pursuit of happiness: overcoming the dark side of hedonism and reward

When the Egyptian King Intef died some 4,000 years ago, his tomb was inscribed with a song that encourages its audience to live a life of what came to be called hedonism: “Revel in pleasure while your life endures… never weary grow/In eager quest of what your heart desires.” Some 3,800 years later, the pursuit of happiness was […]

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