dmunger

Last week we asked readers how far they'd go to save a little money. Would you wash and re-use disposable plastic silverware? Get a "Doggie Bag" for your restaurant leftovers? Over 5,000 people responded to our Casual Fridays thriftfest last week -- the most popular Casual Friday ever, thanks to a…

How did you decide to read this post? You might have seen the headline in an RSS reader or noticed it on the ScienceBlogs home page. Maybe someone emailed or tweeted the link to you. But you still had to make the decision to actually read it. How do you know when you made that decision? In 1965 H.H…

My column on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM today discusses recent research on acupuncture: The science behind acupuncture is dubious. It's difficult to properly control an acupuncture study because its practitioners--and those receiving treatment--are heavily invested in the results. In a Norwegian study of…

Jim and Nora each attended summer camps that they enjoyed tremendously this past summer. When we picked up Nora from her camp, she was completely exhausted. Why? She and her new friends had only gotten 30 minutes of pretend sleep the night before. This was to fool their counselors before sneaking…

Greta and I are back from a busy summer, the school year has started, and today's high temperature here in North Carolina will only be in the 70s! I can actually wear long pants again. You know what that means: It's time to ramp up Survey Monkey for another season of Casual Fridays studies. This…

One of the most exciting moments of my junior-high-school career was stepping into my first-ever foreign-language classroom. While foreign language studies had a reputation for being tedious, I was nonetheless thrilled at the idea of being able to communicate with people from a different, seemingly…

In case you missed them, here are my selections from the psychology and neuroscience posts on ResearchBlogging.org for the past week: Confronted with fake video evidence, nearly everyone confesses. In a simulated "crime," researchers were able to induce false confessions -- but fewer people were…

Take a look at the following picture: Your job is to look for the one line that's either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better? How about now? A little easier, right? But the task can be made difficult again by randomly changing the…

We've discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It's a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example, a banana in series of pictures of familiar objects). But if a second such image (another piece of…

In case you missed them, these are my picks from ResearchBlogging.org's psychology and neuroscience categories. Neat stuff! Neurological basis for desire for amputation. This post explains why some people have a seemingly rational desire for a healthy limb to be removed. Are humans genetically…

[This post was originally published in September, 2007] Here's a task that four-year-olds can do but three-year-olds have some trouble with. Imagine Sally in the picture below is playing with a ball. She puts the ball in the box and goes to the kitchen to get a drink. While she's gone, Bill takes…

Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora: They've clearly been distorted (using the "spherize" filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim's been "expanded" to make more spherical, while Nora has been "contracted" to look more concave. If you look at these photos for a while, you…

Over at Seedmagazine.com, my new column "Research Blogging" debuted today. Every Wednesday I'll be discussing what's new in the research blogosphere, and this week I cover a fascinating post by Jeremy Yoder about lactose tolerance in adults. Here's a sample: The researchers say the lactase gene…

Last year Nora and I went on a hike in the remote Pasayten Wilderness in northern Washington state. Parts of the hike were extremely grueling, while other parts were quite easy and fun. I made this short video to try to capture the differences: The music was added as an afterthought, but in the…

You may have noticed that Cognitive Daily hasn't exactly been living up to its name recently. During the summer vacation season, we travel quite a bit, so it's difficult to maintain our usual pace of posting. But along the way we've collected some great photos, and we'll try to share a few of them…

Over at ResearchBlogging.org, in addition to my other duties, I'm serving as the Psychology/Neuroscience editor. Every week starting today, I'll be making "Editor's selections" -- choose the top posts in these fields. For your convenience, I'm also sharing them here. Enjoy! Here's one for your…

Implicit attitudes and associations can tell us a lot about a person. It's a way to find out if they might have a racial or gender bias, and recently there has even been some work suggesting that an implicit association test can tell us whether someone is lying -- it's called the autobiographical…

Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same…

[Originally posted in April 2007] Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting…

[Originally posted in November 2006] The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting? Perhaps, but an…

[Originally posted in January 2008] When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is…

When school budgets are cut, programs in music and the arts are often the first to get axed. While this makes a certain amount of sense because music isn't always considered "essential" to education, recently in the U.S. we're starting to see another justification for cutting music out of schools.…

The hollow-face illusion is one of the most dramatic and robust illusions I've ever come across. It's been known for well over 200 years, but it never ceases to amaze me, as this video demonstrates: A three-dimensional hollow face mask held a few feet away will appear to be convex (turned "out"…

[Originally posted in December, 2007] Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually…

My computer has over 5,000 songs on it -- 16.2 days' worth, according to my music-playing software. So how do I pick what song to listen to? More often than not, I just shuffle the whole list and play whatever album shows up on top. But if I'm in the car listening to the radio, I switch between the…

Take a look at this movie (you'll need a video player like QuickTime or Windows Media Player installed in your browser to see it). You'll see four different outdoor scenes flash by, one at a time. The scene itself will only be displayed for a fraction of a second, followed immediately by a…

Take a group of 18- and 19-year-old women, college freshmen and sophomores. Then test them to find out who has the most social anxiety: who's most nervous about dealing with other people, particularly in public situations. What would be the most difficult thing you could ask these high-social-…

Due to exciting new career developments, I've decided to shelve Cognitive Monthly. I still think this sort of thing is a good idea, and CogMonthly was selling about as well as I expected. But I'm in the process of making a major career change (which should not affect Cognitive Daily), and something…

New parents can come up with a seemingly endless array of vexing questions about their infants, from the best brand of stroller to the ideal song to sing them to sleep. The questions begin well before the child is born: what type of clothing should you purchase? What kind of crib? One question…

Jemsite, a website, forum and blog about guitars, has posted a fairly extensive interview with me about the psychology of music, Cognitive Daily, and other projects I'm working on. Plus, you can find out the name of Jim's Southern rock band, so head on over and check it out!