“You guys know an awful lot that could really benefit the public”—this is the motto of Lasting Learning (http://www.lastinglearning.com/), a start-up company run by Cameron Broumand, a former real estate man whom I interviewed recently about his vision for how Psychonomic knowledge can feature in a commercial enterprise. Cameron’s story starts with his experience as a […]
Legend has it that in Texas, and perhaps other jurisdictions where the value of pi is determined by political vote, sharpshooters market their skills by first firing a shotgun at a barn door and then painting a bull’s eye around their preferred hole. There has been much concern recently that parts of science are not immune […]
You are deep in the Amazonian rain forest and there is a rustle behind you that’s coming closer. Guess what your brain is doing at that moment? It’s planning your escape. We plan our escape the moment we hear an approaching sound but we ignore a crisis that has been looming for decades until it […]
Living in a world suffused with news about violent conflict around the world, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that humans are, by and large, averse to harming others. Even in war, the reluctance of soldiers to fire at their opponents is legendary, and overcoming this reluctance is a cornerstone of military training. […]
About 15 years ago, I tried computer speech dictation for the first time. I had a paper to write, and I thought speaking to the computer would be much more efficient than typing. It was a complete disaster; what appeared in my word processor bore no resemblance to what I was saying. Luckily I was […]
Towards the end of last year, submissions from Psychonomics authors who expressed an interest in a post on their article began to outpace the ability of our team—that is me, Anna, Cassie, Gary, Melissa, and Steve—to keep up with reporting all of this interesting science to a broader audience. To deal with the growing backlog, the Psychonomic Society thankfully approved […]
What if your dad told you that you were capable of time travel? Well, what day goes by when we don’t imagine landing our dream job or snagging that grant? How many days go by that we don’t look fondly on that time we pretended to be incredibly sick and took our best friend’s car to […]
What is the connection between the spelling of a word and its meaning? Does the fact that the words “lead” (the metal) and “lead” (to go in front) are spelled the same somehow make them more similar in meaning than they would be if their spelling differed? A recent paper by Peleg and colleagues published in […]
We are born with the neural circuitry required to detect the emotion in facial expressions. By the age of 7 months, human infants clearly distinguish between faces that are angry and others that are happy or neutral. At the same age, effects of parenting are also beginning to emerge, with infants of parents who are particularly sensitive […]
A different sort of American Revolution took place in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The rift was again between the US and Britain, with those American upstarts once more insisting on going their own way. But this was a quiet revolution, so quiet that few people even noticed it. It was a revolution in how we […]