A few years ago Malcolm Gladwell made the "10,000 hour rule" famous in his book Outliers. In practice (e.g., discussions with people day to day or on this blog) the rule gets translated into the inference "practice is what matters." When talking ab...

Nicolas Guéguen has had a prolific scientific career. From bust size and hitchhiking to bust size and courtship solicitation, his topics are...well, not very wide-ranging. But they're important questions that need to be asked. Here, he tackles a pa...

My grandfather was really smart. Instead of paying me an hourly wage to pick weeds, he paid me 2 cents per weed. I just knew that if I pulled fast enough, I would make more money, and I pulled weeds like there was no tomorrow. Like my grandfather, ...

Most of us would agree that harming others on purpose and for no reason is immoral. Social scientists have long assumed that marketplaces are to blame for many a compromised moral. There's no shortage of historical examples: take the slave trade, or...

The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder? The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fo...

The number of studies done about the effects of ovulation on a woman's behavior is pretty astounding. From musical preferences to gaydar, ovulation apparently affects just about everything -- including, as shown here, their political and religious ...

In a short blog post last week, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), announced that the organization would be "re-orienting its research away from DSM categories". After criticizing the fact that Unlike our d...

I've been wondering: Suppose neuroscientists faced absolutely no financial or ethical constraints. What would that allow us to do? What kind of hitherto-intractable questions would we be able to answer? Well, the money would certainly let us make...

When, in a moment of weakness, you reach for that chocolate donut or bag of jelly beans, to all appearances your tastebuds are running the show. You imagine the snack's sweet taste; you might even salivate a little. If, on the other hand, these foods...

Prescriptions of antipsychotic (aka neuroleptic) drugs in North American children and adolescents have been rising rapidly in recent years. But why? Gabrielle Carlson of Stony Brook Children's Hospital offers her thoughts in a brief paper: The Drama...

Four years ago, neuroscientists became aware of an ominous-sounding manuscript entitled "Voodoo Correlations In Social Neuroscience". This piece was eventually published under a more prosaic name but it still hit home, with nearly 500 citations so fa...

There have been a number of (pretty hilarious) studies focusing on the science of disgust -- for example, being horny apparently makes everything seem less disgusting. Here, the researchers wanted to test the different effects of anger and disgust ...