Fact of the day

Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Fact N° 2664
Bears can count as well as primates can.
Fact N° 2665
A spike in online activity can (sometimes) indicate depression.
According to a study in IEEE Xplore: Technology & Society Magazine, depression is often linked to a change in internet-related behaviors. The study recruited 216 undergraduate students as study participants, gave them a questionnaire to measure levels of depression and compared those results with the participants' internet use (traffic flow and bandwidth, not actual content). The results indicated a general trend: people with depression sent more email, exhibited more "flow duration entropy" (constant switching between applications) and used the internet more, in general.
Fact N° 2666
A trustworthy face outweighs a person's reputation.
A study published in the journal PLoS One generated a set of 20 faces and then manipulated them to be either more or less trustworthy (wider faces are generally seen as less trustworthy than thin ones). Study participants were allocated money and then told they could invest in a "trustee" (one of the generated faces); their money would be tripled, but it would be up to the trustee how much to send back to them. The results: 13 out of 15 participants invested more in the trustworthy faces. A followup experiment involved the exact same game, but involved randomly-assigned histories for the trustees, giving them good or bad personal histories. Even with this hard data about past behavior, participants still invested more money in the trustworthy faces.
Fact N° 2667
Internet hypochondriacs and gamblers operate on similar patterns of thinking.
A 2012 study in the journal Psychological Science observed that people are likely to find patterns in a series of unrelated events. Researchers then set out to determine how this tendency influences people's reliance on the internet to check medical symptoms (a 2009 Pew poll found that 60% of Americans rely on the internet for medical information). The study presented three groups of participants with a list of symptoms for a fictional kind of thyroid cancer; each group received the list of symptoms in a different order. Researchers found that when generalized, common symptoms -- like shortness of breath and fatigue -- were lumped together, participants were more likely to self-diagnose with the fictional cancer than when the list of symptoms was jumbled. The mechanism is similar to the one that makes gamblers believe they're on a "hot streak" -- finding a pattern in random events.
Fact N° 2668
Thinking about wine can make you less inhibited.
According to a study in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, the power of suggestion has more effect on outcomes than most people -- even in scientific fields -- tend to think. Researchers compared "response expectancies" to the placebo effect, demonstrating that the simple suggestion of something like a lucky rabbit's foot or a relaxing glass of wine can influence actual behavior -- the expectation of an outcome, in other words, makes you unconsciously behave in a way that makes that outcome more likely. The effect isn't even limited to deliberate suggestion; police lineups, for example, tend to yield more false IDs when organized by someone who knows who the suspect is (again, a case of anticipation unconsciously influencing actual behavior).
Fact N° 2669
Morning larks are happier than night owls.
Research appearing in the journal Emotion indicates that morning people aren't just more energetic in the morning; they're happier overall. The study polled two groups of adults, 732 in all, about their preferred time of day and their overall emotional state. "Morningness" was associated with increased happiness in both groups, and both morningness and happiness tended to increase with age. Morning people also reported feeling healthier overall. One theory is that being a night owl makes someone more prone to social jet lag (being forced to get up early for school or work, for example, even while under-rested).
Fact N° 2670
Some skills can be reinforced while asleep.
A Northwestern study tasked participants with learning two musical tunes that they would have to play back with carefully timed key presses. The participants then took a 90-minute nap. Researchers presented them with one of the tunes while they were engaged in slow-wave sleep, a stage of sleep associated with reinforcing memories. When the participants were later asked to play back both tunes, they made fewer errors on the tune they'd heard while asleep. The study authors stressed that this phenomenon applies to reinforcing memories of skills already learned, rather than learning new skills, so trying to learn a new language while asleep is probably only going to work if you're also hearing that language during the day.

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