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Neuroscience Research

New research in neuroscience

Reward Success, Don’t Punish Failure

It's a management maxim that bosses should dole out praise liberally when deserved, although many business environments seem more focused on punishing failure. It turns out there's solid neuroscience behind the idea of recognizing success,…

The Outsider Effect

Trying to juice up your next ad campaign? Develop a clever new product strategy? Research shows that adding an outsider to the mix can improve the thinking of your team and produce better results. According to a study published in the…

Management Lessons from Airplane Crashes

Airplane crashes don't happen often, and when they do they are no doubt among the most-studied failures in any industry. Most bad business decisions, by contrast, are pushed into the past as quickly as possible. That may be one lesson -…

Sugar as Brain Food

This isn't great news for dieters, but sometimes sugar can be a good thing. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, had subjects perform a mentally taxing task - watching a video while being careful to ignore random…

Talking Back Makes Kids Smart

Once again, I'm going to depart from marketing for one post for another neuroparenting topic. This time, it's about kids "talking back" to their parents and how that interaction can actually enhance cognitive development.

Brain Fight: Who’s the Decider?

One of my favorite chapters in How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is The Brain is an Argument. In this chapter, Lehrer highlights how complex our decision-making process really is, and how competing options battle for supremacy.

Sit Straight, Build Confidence

We know that making ourselves smile or frown can actually influence our mood, and now it seems that the posture we assume can affect our confidence in our own thoughts. A study by Richard Petty, who apparently is not the NASCAR driver but…

How We Decide

Book Review: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer Jonah Lehrer has been translating neuroscience into prose comprehensible by the lay reader for years, and How We Decide helps readers understand and even apply current research in the process of…

Order Effect Affects Orders

The last time you bought a product online, you probably went through a logical analysis of alternative products, prices, features, and so on. And perhaps you really did. Research shows, however, that we are actually far from rational when…

How To Praise Your Child

I don't often get into neuro-parenting here, but I thought this particular research finding was interesting enough to single out. (I mentioned it in my Managing by Mistakes post last week, too.) The short story is that a lot of what parents…