Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]
Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]
“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]
“We all sometimes feel that we make different decisions when we’re hungry. We can now be more specific about this, by distinguishing planned vs. habitual actions.” – Sanjay Manohar Hunger is a beast. It can make us act unlike ourselves at times. As every Snickers ad reminds us: you’re not you when you’re hungry. We […]
When I was a kid, I had a pair of sunglasses that had little mirrors on the side of the lenses that allowed you to see what was happening behind you. I would walk around my neighborhood feeling so cool, like a bona fide Spy Kid. James Bond had nothing on me. I thought someday […]
The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]
Imagine learning how to read and play music for the first time. It starts with a series of dots and lines thrown around on a piece of paper. Soon you learn how to interpret these so-called notes. You assign a letter name to each note, and then you figure out how to produce that note […]
George Bernard Shaw is credited for saying, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” It is not clear whether or not he actually said that, but the sentiment is clear that people have a tendency to place judgement or discrimination on the basis of accent or dialect. Accent is the way […]
Music has long been the inspiration for many directions of cognitive science research. Music has a special connection with the brain that makes us ask pivotal questions, such as: How do we know that music is music when we hear it? Why does music evoke emotional responses? And why do we associate Mariah Carey and […]
When you sit down at the end of a long day and turn on Netflix, do you turn the subtitles on? If so, you are joined by many other viewers who prefer watching television and movies with the closed captions feature. In 2006, the Office of Communications in the UK found that 7.5 million people […]