Are People Born With a Left-to-Right Number Line?
If I ask you where you’d put the number 4 in relation to the number 12, chances are you’d put 4 to the left and 12 to the right. Most adults have some form of a mental number line that
How Much of Life Is Spent Mind-Wandering?
The human mind is hard to pin down. It goes where it wants, not necessarily where it’s supposed to, and it’s averse to sitting still. But how much does the mind wander? How much of our time do we spend
Decisions in the “Trolley Dilemma” Differ From Real-Life Behavior
Maybe you’ve heard this one: there’s a runaway trolley car headed toward a fork in the tracks. Standing on one set of tracks, oblivious to the trolley car careening out of control, is a group of five people. On the
Knocking Down Walls in Virtual Reality Can Boost Creativity
Creativity can be thought of as a process of breaking down walls between different ideas. Now, a team of researchers in China and the United States have taken that metaphor to entirely new levels by showing that breaking down walls
What Happens After 30 Years of Not Using an Exceptional Memory?
How many digits can you remember at once? Psychologists refer to this as a digit span test. For example, I might give you a number like 59368572 and ask you to repeat it back to me. Typically, people can hold
How the Brain Links Generosity and Happiness
Sometimes the best way to make yourself happy is to make others happy. Recently, an international team of researchers made some progress in zeroing in on why this may be the case. In their study, the researchers divided participants up
The Difficulty of Knowing What “Average” Is
When people are asked how their abilities stack up against others’, psychologists have noticed a pattern: people tend to rate themselves as above average. Even though, of course, not everyone can be better than average. There are two ways of
Near Misses Drive Gambling Behavior
One of the paradoxes of gambling is that losing can make people want to keep playing as much as winning. All losses are not created equal, though. Several studies published recently in the Journal of Gambling Studies suggest that near
Is There a Perfectly Boring Task?
Boredom research is a fairly popular area of study in psychology recently. It’s not to be confused with boring research because it can give us some interesting insights into how people work, which is one reason I’ve written about it
Some Habits Are Harder to Break Than Others
Our lives are full of habits, healthy and unhealthy, big and small. Sometimes we don’t even realize how deeply ingrained some of our regular behaviors are until we try to break them. According to a new study from researchers at
