Love Ravens.

Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills – the first large-scale assessment of common ravens compared with chimpanzees and orangutans found full-blown cognitive skills present in ravens at the age of 4 months similar to that of adult apes, including theory of mind. Read More

Birds vs Income

Biological diversity evokes happiness in people – More bird species in the vicinity increase life satisfaction of Europeans as much as higher income. 14 additional bird species raise the level of life satisfaction at least as much as an extra 124 Euros per month. (n=26,000) Read More

Self is a Victim

A new personality construct has been defined that describes people who persistently see themselves as victims within interpersonal conflicts. The research was published in Personality and Individual Differences. Study authors Rahav Gabay and team describe how the social world is satiated with interpersonal transgressions that are often unpleasant and seemingly unwarranted, such as being interrupted […]

Pain Is Inevitable. Suffering Is A Choice.

Pain has mainly two forms. It can be either the driver of change and a reminder that our life isn’t exactly close to what we envisioned it to be. Or it can be a devastating force that leaves us powerless and reduces our ability to objectively evaluate our self-worth. The former is empowering. The latter […]

Feeling chills?

The sensation of feeling chills while listening to music was associated with the power of theta waves in the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex. The work builds on other studies suggesting that music can also trigger the brain’s reward system, even though it doesn’t provide a tangible survival benefit. Read More

Rolls-Royce Engineering

Searching for the “perfect” automotive sound idea is nothing new. Mercedes-Benz was bragging about its signature door “thunk” six years ago. Porsche has manufactured a particular sound piped into its cabin to augment the otherwise near-silent ride of the electric Taycan sedan. The deep rumble of the Lamborghini Aventador can be identified from blocks away. […]

Ten Ideas That Have Shaped My Life

Taken from Ten Ideas That Have Shaped My Life 1. Reality is Malleable Steve Jobs, here in a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Historical Society, presents one of the ideas that changed his life: Most of us will have far less impact than Jobs did. Yet in the smaller spheres of our […]

Twenty-one

Science usually steers firmly away from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what he really wants to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind — if there is such a thing — is […]

Anti-Capitalism?

You can’t escape it; capitalism has a bad rap. Last night, thousands of anti-capitalist protestors took to the streets in capital cities across the world. Wearing V for Vendetta-inspired Guy Fawkes masks (most of which are made in China), these self-styled “anti-establishment” demonstrators, who took part in annual Million Mask March, sought to express their […]

Not Happy?

Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, and a team of psychologists have found evidence for what they call “prevalence-induced concept change”. What this means is that how we apply concepts changes depending on how many examples of that concept are around. In one experiment, psychologists showed subjects coloured dots on the spectrum of blue […]

The Inconvenient Truth about Your “Authentic” Self

Everyone wants to be authentic. You want to be true to yourself, not a slavish follower of social expectations. You want to “live your best life,” pursuing your particular desires, rather than falling in line with whatever everyone else thinks happiness requires. Studies have even shown that feelings of authenticity can go hand in hand […]

Technology is not the demon, it is our social psychology

Ofcom released its Communications Market Report 2016 last week. According to the report, UK digital consumption patterns have reached an all-time high, and trends for more universal access are bullish. Yet rather than celebrating the web for bringing the world’s information to our fingertips, coverage of the report focused on what it called “connectivity creep”: […]

Brexit Pt I

What a cluster fuck Brexit is. This popped up in my Facebook feed earlier today and I had an immediate knee jerk reaction to it, nothing is ever this clear cut: So, without any further ado-ing, here’s the full post for your delectation: Alright, you filthy animals. I don’t normally do this, because I […]

The Banker and The Fisherman

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican […]

Selling ourselves. Selling everything.

I still cannot understand the logic behind why there is such an obsession with celebrity in western society today. Such bizarre voyeurism from both the paparazzi and the people who support them. Daily Mail, I’m looking at you. What are we doing? Selling ourselves. Selling everything. The happiest day of my life – oh, […]

It’s not my problem

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it: ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there […]

The Golden Spruce

Grant Hadwin got a chainsaw and did something terrible. Originally posted on The New Yorker There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of […]