Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong — a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.

Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes -- and fool everyone's eyes in the same way -- Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

A good video from Ted2004 - click to watch

http://www.ted.com/playlists/4/what_makes_you_happy

The key to Beethoven and Mozart ? Brain Study Explores Gift of "Perfect Pitch"

We, "normal and most" people can distinguish between musical notes only in relation to other notes, while some people who have "absolute pitch"can accurately identify notes without having to rely on any reference tones.

This special hearing skill is thought to be a key aspect of extraordinary musical ability, and seems that composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach were said to have had it.

Learn more at:
http://www.hearingreview.com/2015/01/brain-study-explores-rare-gift-perfect-pitch/

The Scientific Power of Meditation

Meditation is an activity often suggested to those having problems with pain, stress, depression, anxiety and other struggles of the human condition. 

It's easy for some to disregard the activity as new-age nonsense, but is there more to it - AsapSCIENCE explores the study of meditation, considering the findings of relevant scientific research.

Check out the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw71zanwMnY&feature=em-subs_digest

The divided brain and the making of the Western World (by Iain McGilchrist)

In this TED Talk, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain.

Theories of the 1960s and ’70s, gave rise to a lot of speculation on the "different functions" for the two halves of the brain to do, as if it were a machine with a lot of little specialised modules –language here, maths there, or reason here, emotion there.

Over time, science discovered that each so-called ‘function’ was carried out in both hemispheres, not one, recognizing that the differences lay not in what they do, but how they do it. 

So differences are not simply explained by "emotion on the right brain, reason on the left brain," but something far more complex and interesting.
https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain

The 2014 Year review

It wasn't all doom and gloom in 2014, a year with many different remarkable moments; Ebola, the ISIS propaganda, Microsoft's new CEO, the Uber arising,  alonside with the many fascinating push for wearable computing. 

Here is The Verge review of the year.

Why do hard chairs increase rigidity in negotiations?

A study by Joshua M. Ackerman (MIT), Christopher C. Nocera (Harvard), and John A. Bargh (Yale) showed that “hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations.” 

One of a series of experiments involved a simulated car price negotiation in which the subject had to make a price offer for a car, which was rejected. Then, the “buyer” had to make a second offer. The subjects were also asked to evaluate their negotiating partner. The researchers found that there was a significant difference between subjects sitting in hard and soft chairs. Those seated in hard chairs judged their negotiating partner to be less emotional. Most significantly, the “buyers” in soft chairs increased their offer by nearly 40% more than those in hard chairs. 
In short, a hard chair not changed the buyers’ perception of their negotiating partner, it made them harder bargainers.

Another experiment had subjects feel a hard block of wood or a soft blanket before rating a boss/employee interaction. The subjects who felt the hard block rated the employee as being more rigid than those who felt the blanket. 

Do these laboratory findings translate into real-world results? 
Study author Joshua Ackerman says, “I suspect that the stresses of real-world decision-making environments will act as mental distracters, making people even more susceptible to the effects of tactile cues.”

Thinking; Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman is an eminence  on Judgement and Decision Making.  Since mid-1970s, with Amos Tversky, he was among the first academics to research on "why we make "wrong" decisions".

Early studies from late 70's gave birth to the Prospect Theory - a behavioral economic theory stating that people make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than on the final outcome, and that people evaluate these losses and gains using certain heuristics. Such descriptive model tries to model real-life choices rather than optimal decision and awarded Kahneman with the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2002 for work with Tversky, who died before the award.

Drawing on decades of research, on his best seller book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Kahneman goes on an exploration of what influences human thought.  Here is one of the bases of my master thesis; the so called System 1 and System 2, the fast and slow types of thinking, that become characters illustrating the psychology behind things we think we understand but that really don't, such as intuition.

 

The dichotomy between these two modes of thought - S1 fast, instinctive and emotional and S2 slower, more deliberative, and more logical - is basis for a substantial explanation of the cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking and its own processes. If you get to the full picture, the reading of this book will potentially change the way you think, not just about thinking, but about how we live our lives.

 

 

 

A talk on TED - The riddle of experience vs memory

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory

 

An interviewn on SPIEGEL : Debunking the Myth of Intuition

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/interview-with-daniel-kahneman-on-the-pitfalls-of-intuition-and-memory-a-834407-2.HTML