August 2007

Everyone is familiar with the want vs. should conflict. Do you order the loaded cheese fries as your side dish, or the steamed broccoli? You want the greasy fries, but you know you should order the broccoli. Do you cut the grass (should)…

There's an epidemic of obesity in the U.S., and new research helps explain the difficulty many people have in avoiding fattening foods. British researchers have shown that chocolate acts on the brain in a way similar to addictive drugs.…

If you thought that "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" was mere gender stereotyping, you'll be surprised by research results that show women really do prefer colors with more pink in them. Anna Hulbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle…

One of the enduring fictions of neuromarketing is that there is a "buy button" in the brain. Marketers salivate at the thought, and consumer groups fear it. (Some might say that marketers have been pushing that button with seductive…

The human mind may be well suited to surviving in dangerous forests and plains, but it doesn't do as well with modern financial decisions. A lengthy and interesting article in Money by Jason Zweig (read it online at CNNMoney.com - Your…

In our recent article on The Mating Mind, we described how "romantically primed" men were much more likely to spend lots of money than men who were not so primed, and than women in either condition. Separately, we've also noted that…

The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain (Edited by Floyd E. Bloom MD; Dana Press, 270 pp.) is a wide-ranging compilation of brain science articles from Scientific American and Scientific American…

"Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language." So said Dale Carnegie, famed author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. As it turns out, Carnegie may have been onto something long…

When we wrote our recent review of Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds by Dan Hill, our interest in facial coding was sparked. Or, perhaps, re-sparked; when we read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, we found his discussion of facial coding to…

These days, people are spending a lot of time online, much of it in Web communities and social networks. Second Life is a virtual world in which users create avatars to represent themselves and interact with others. Entrepreneurs have…