The human mind is an attachment machine, forming emotional bonds with stuffed animals, invertebrates and Izzie Stevens.

Les Jonah Lehrer om ensomhet, parasosiale forhold og fordypningen i å kunne se tv-serier på dvd.

[...] a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.

[...]

Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn’t affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of their reward. One target brought up another symbol that told them how much water they would get, while the other brought up a random symbol.

After a few days of training, the monkeys almost always looked at the target that would give them advance intel, even though it never actually affected how much water they were given. They wanted knowledge for its own sake. What’s more, even though the gap between picking a target and sipping some water was very small, the monkeys still wanted to know what was in store for them mere seconds later. To them, ignorance is far from bliss.

Not Exactly Rocket Science, via The Frontal Cortex

… men først i dag har jeg fått med meg at Ariely også blogger, i forbindelse med utgivelsen av boka Predictably Irrational. Der fant jeg blant annet ut hva en indonesisk ærlighetskafé er, og hvorfor Ariely tror de kan komme til å virke mot sin hensikt. Money quote fra bloggen:

Before the financial crisis of 2008, it was rather difficult to convince people that we all might have irrational tendencies.

What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

Resultatet av denne studien er kanskje litt mindre overraskende?

The male brains are just “doing the math” and turn off after they have made a decision. The female brains [...] are worrying, and thinking about the reward consequences, after they have decided how much to repay.

1. Det ser ut til å være vitenskapelig belegg for at selvkontroll faktisk blir oppbrukt sånn i løpet av en dag. Å motstå en liten sprekk tidlig kan rett og slett føre til at man går på en større sprekk seint:

Our decisions really are swayed by the computational limits of our brain. For example, in 2003 neuroeconomists noticed that subjects on diets who resisted temptation in the morning (by foregoing the chance to grab snacks from a nearby basket) later ate significantly more ice cream in an ice-cream taste test than subjects who hadn’t exercised self-control. They also quit 40 percent earlier when confronted with a difficult math problem. By resisting the morning snacks, they had temporarily “used up” their ability to resist further temptation. (Other variables that seem to exhaust our self-control are alcohol, stress, and sleep deprivation.)

The moral of this data is that we have to pick our battles.

2. Andre steder er det dårligere med vitenskapelig belegg: Artikkelen “Five Fallacies of Grief” i Scientific American viser til mangelen på forskning som underbygger de mye omtalte fem sorgstadiene fra Kübler-Ross (fornektelse og alt det der, du vet). Det er lite som tyder på at stadieteorien stemmer, men mye som tyder på at vi har en innbitt trang til forutsigbare historier om oss selv:

Why stages? We are pattern-seeking, storytelling primates trying to make sense of an often chaotic and unpredictable world. A stage theory works in a manner similar to a species-classification heuristic or an evolutionary-sequence schema. Stages also fit well into a chronological sequence where stories have set narrative patterns. Stage theories “impose order on chaos, offer predictability over uncertainty, and optimism over despair,”

Nytt for meg at dette er så dårlig underbygd, men referansene tyder på at Kübler-Ross-stadiene er debunka for lenge siden, selv om de lever lystig, eh, traurig, videre i populærkulturen og andre steder. Det gjør selvfølgelig også den enda grundigere tilbakeviste ideen om at vi bruker så sørgelig få prosent av hjernen, som jeg faktisk hørte noen vise til seinest i går. Denial is not a river in Egypt, men tydeligvis heller ingen nødvendig sorgreaksjon

In research by Nass and Reeves at Stanford (The Media Equation, Nass and Reeves, Cambridge University Press) 125 adults viewed segments showing a variety of scenes, on two different screen sizes. They concluded that picture size does affect memory. The bigger the screen the better the retention. Interestingly screen size also affected levels of arousal and their evaluation of the content, the larger screen eliciting more positive evaluations.

Clark undres hvilke konsekvenser dette har for e-læring og ikke minst ideen om mobillæring, hvis det faktisk er slik at vi tar dårligere til oss det vi får presentert på en liten skjerm. Jeg tror det i hvert fall kan være nok et argument mot å bruke store ressurser på å utvikle mange typer innhold spesifikt for små skjermer; bedre med fleksibel utforming som lar de som trenger og ønsker det og som det fungerer for, hente ut informasjon på liten skjerm. Jamfør også Espens utmerkede posting om teknologikontroll.

Jeg satte også stor pris på at Clark får inn noen herlige stikk mot anti-tv-snobberiet og ser nå fram til en hjerneutvidende tv-anskaffelse i nær framtid.