Did Sherlock Holmes practice mindfulness? I’ve read just about every Holmes story (really!) and there’s no mention of mindfulness or meditation. Holmes certainly never sat cross-legged on a cushion or uttered ‘om’ in any of the stories. However, in her book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, psychologist Maria Konnikova describes Holmes as the…
Whenever you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, you can use the novelty rule to break up the monotony. Most adults settle into routines, both in their personal and professional lives. These routines are everywhere: people take the same route to work, they eat the same item from their favorite restaurant, or they shop…
You can learn about intelligence by studying puppies. Too often, we treat intelligence and potential like they are binary outcomes. Someone is either smart or they’re not. They’re either capable of doing something or they’re not. But the reality is more nuanced. A longitudinal study by Duke University’s Canine Cognition Lab challenges our traditional views…
Have you noticed there’s less color in our lives? Vibrant colors like bright reds, blues, and greens seem to be fading from popular use and are being replaced by more subdued grays, beiges, blacks, and neutral tones. This is happening in almost every industry – from automobiles to interior design, fashion and makeup, and even…
It might feel good when AI is a sycophant but it’s potentially dangerous. A sycophant describes a person who uses insincere praise and excessive agreement to win the favor, protection, or approval of someone, usually for personal gain. The leading AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, clearly have been designed to…
I recently met with a former close colleague to catch up and celebrate the birth of his first child. During a wide-ranging 4-hour (!) conversation, my friend dropped an intriguing nugget: First born girls look more like their fathers than their mothers so their fathers are more likely to accept them, as historically men have…
Does spelling matter? A young colleague recently asked me that after the two of us wondered whether to spell the word ‘collectable’ or ‘collectible’. To my eye, collectable seemed correct – able to be collected. As a counterpoint, my colleague pointed out that spellcheck accepted collectible. So, which is it? Most online sources suggest either…
According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, emotions aren’t hardwired in your brain but are instead “made in the moment.“ Historically, scientists believed your brain triggers an evolutionary response to external factors, causing your body to act in a predetermined way. For example, if you saw a bear in the woods, you…
Ever heard of the buttered cat paradox? The buttered cat paradox is a humorous thought experiment which combines two common adages: While you may think it’s an urban legend, experiments have shown 81% of the time buttered toast lands on the floor butter side down. Also, a phenomenon known as the cat righting reflex has…
The Zeigarnik effect describes the fact that people tend to remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones. It happens because “unfinished tasks create a cognitive burden, weigh more heavily on the mind, and are more easily recalled than completed tasks.” The effect was first described in the 1920s by Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik after observing…