How Tragic Movies Help Us Count Our Blessings

movies


Why do we like watching movies that make us feel depressed? A recent study published at Ohio State University may have an answer. This research is one of the first attempts to take a scientific approach to explaining why people enjoy fictional tragedies.

The Information Diet: How to Be a Smarter Consumer of Information

information diet


The main idea behind Clay Johnson’s new book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption is that we need to monitor the way we consume information in the same way we need to monitor what we eat and drink.

In today’s “information age,” we are constantly being bombarded with facts and opinions from television, radio, cellphones, and computers. In fact, according to Eric Schmidt, a software engineer and executive chairman at Google, every 48 hours there is more content being created on the internet than all the content that was created from the beginning of time to 2003.

That’s a lot of new information being created everyday! And this unprecedented growth of information has both its upsides and downsides.

How Much Love Can You Create in an fMRI in 5 Minutes?

In an interesting “1st Annual Love Competition” associated with The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, contestants had 5 minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone as hard as they could. The brain regions involved in producing the neurochemical experience of love were measured, and the contestant who generated the greatest level of (more…)