Mindframe

Apples: they’re full of fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins. And yet, if your young child scored a homemade candy apple while Trick-or-Treating, there’s a chance you’d be telling them to discard that fruit at first opportunity. After all, remember that news story about malevolent weirdos hiding razor blades in their Halloween apples? Surely that’s important to keep in mind here. Salience bias is the human tendency to evaluate situations based on the information available to us, regardless of how relevant that information may or may not be. What is the actual statistical likelihood that somebody in your neighborhood wanted so badly to hurt children that they inserted blades into a bunch of apples? (Keep in mind: basically every reported instance of adulterated Halloween candy has been a hoax, and no serious injuries have ever been reported.) By the numbers, it’s staggeringly more likely that your child would just enjoy a sweet, crunchy snack. But with that razor blade story weighing...

  Read this shopping list, and then cover it with your hand: Bread Milk Oranges Peanut Butter Yogurt Pickles Turkey Folders Tissue Gum Now, how many of the items can you remember without peeking? Give yourself a moment to recall as many of them as you can. (We’ll wait.) If you left out an item (or several), chances are good it wasn’t the bread or the gum, but rather something in the middle. And if that’s the case, congratulations, you have something in common with 19 th century psychologist and memory pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus. At the time, the prevailing thought held that memory was impossible to study in any scientific fashion; it was simply too nebulous, too mysterious. Ebbinghaus disagreed. But since every single mind is different, how in the world would he eliminate confounding variables? His imperfect yet deeply elegant solution: to study only a single experimental subject—himself. To collect his data, Ebbinghaus tested his own ability t...

First things first: despite any cartoons you might’ve seen, ostriches don’t try to hide from danger by burying their heads in the sand. For one thing, they don’t need to: your average ostrich can run forty miles an hour—that’s faster than Usain Bolt (28 mph)—and they don’t use that speed to win footraces. The tall, gangly creatures do sometimes stick their heads in the sand, but that’s not a fear behavior; that’s the bird using its beak to gently rearrange its eggs, tucked away safe in a dug-out nest. Incidentally, did you know that the ostrich’s closest relative, the emu, is so fierce that in 1932, Australian farmers requested military assistance against the local emu population? And that the Australian military sent down troops, armed with machine guns, who were still unable to bring the emus to heel? It’s called the Emu War, and it is an actual thing that happened . Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you knew it once, and then forgot, because we are all bom...

As the first week of the year draws to a close, you may find yourself reassessing those New Year’s resolutions. Is this really the year you write that novel? Will you seriously watch every Oscar nominated movie before Oscar season this time? Here, however, is one resolution that might be both doable and hugely beneficial, if you’re not doing it already: eat more fish. If you follow nutrition news at all, this will likely not be a bombshell. Scientists have long acknowledged that the particular type of fat found in some fish seems to display a number of healthy properties. To be clear, we’re not saying to load up on fish sticks; this is about the cold water seafood that’s naturally high in Omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, sardines, and herring. From decreased risk of heart disease to improved brain development in fetal infants , there’s just something about intaking those Omega-3’s. Now a new survey highlights what may be the fundamental link between fish oil and intellig...