Mindframe

When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st...

  Happiness: it’s something we all want, and in one way or another, most of us spend our lives attempting to pursue it. Multiple industries are devoted to our quest for increased joy. Now, a team of researchers at Iowa State University have carefully studied several mental strategies designed to make us happier. Their goal is to give us the low-down on the best way to lift a bad mood. The contenders? Loving-kindness, interconnectedness, and downward social comparison. Loving-kindness involves sincerely wishing for other people to be happy. Interconnectedness means meditating on the ties that we all share—for example, universal hopes and dreams. Downward social comparison occurs when you focus on how you are better off than others around you. To test the effectiveness of these various thought patterns, the team—led by Professor Douglas Gentile, Senior Lecturer Dawn Sweet, and grad student Lanmiao He—had college students walk around the building for 12 minutes....

At this point, it’s well-trod territory: why couldn’t star reporter Lois Lane recognize that her nerdy coworker Clark Kent was also Superman? How could simply changing one’s clothes, slipping off a pair of glasses, and brushing one’s hair fool a grown adult? Who could fall for such surface-level changes in appearance? Well. Plenty of people, as it turns out. Researchers at the University of York and University of Huddersfield recently led an experiment testing the average person’s ability to recognize disguised faces in photos. Models were given resources to change their hair, facial hair, and makeup, but were not allowed to wear common spy movie props like hats or sunglasses, since these are banned in most security settings. To sweeten the pot, a cash reward was offered to the model who could fool the most people. There was, it turned out, steep competition. The models fooled participants about 30% of the time. In fact, subjects could only reliably see through a disgui...

Imagine that scientists have discovered a painkiller that is incredibly cheap to make, has no dangerous side effects, and performs at a level comparable to—or even better than—90% of drugs developed in the United States. You might find yourself wanting to reach for a bottle the next time you sprain your back. There’s just one problem: the medication doesn’t, in the traditional sense, work. It’s a sugar pill. The Placebo effect has been a known entity since at least the days of Ben Franklin, when French King Louis XVI tasked an elite panel of scientists and thinkers—Franklin included —with debunking claims made by Mesmerists. For instance, that a properly trained Mesmerist could cure people’s afflictions by manipulating an invisible force called “animal magnetism.” Patients did seem to respond to the treatments, sometimes crying out or even falling unconscious, and at least some reported positive results. However, the commission ultimately found that none of the Mes...

Since the days of Hippocrates, science has struggled to quantify human personality, and group the seemingly infinite combinations of traits into a number of discrete “types”. However, it’s difficult to design a personality-sorting scheme that produces replicable results. In the case of the now oft-derided Myers-Briggs, even beloved systems have earned harsh criticism from the scientific community. Now, from Northwest University, a new study led by Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering has crunched data from more than 1.5 million participants to devise a brand-new way to categorize personality. The subjects were a self-selecting group of internet users willing to answer one of several different online questionnaires developed over the years. These surveys contained between 40 and 200 questions, designed to measure the degree to which each respondent demonstrated five widely agreed-upon personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness...

  Is there someone in your life with an unusually short fuse? Maybe you’ve witnessed a co-worker repeatedly go ballistic on the printer whenever it runs out of ink, or maybe you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a boss who is a yeller, trapping you in meeting after meeting full of angry rants. Well, according to a new scientific paper from the University of Western Australia, this person most likely has another, connected trait: they’re not as smart as they think they are. Yes, in contrary to the age-old legend of the temperamental genius with a stormy, high-trigger attitude, the study found that “trait-anger” (that is, people who experience anger as a part of their everyday disposition) is linked with narcissism, and thus an inflated sense of one’s abilities. Undergraduates from Warsaw, Poland answered questions designed to assess their trait-anger, emotional stability, and narcissism. They were asked to rate their intelligence on a 25-point scale—and then they too...

It’s graduation season, and that means it’s time to celebrate the grads in your life, revel in their accomplishments—and prepare yourself to wedge into some uncomfortable seating for a speech about the importance of uncovering your passion in life. The “follow your dreams” talk has died down a little since the economic collapse of the late aughts. Still, remain in the orbit of a recently graduated high schooler long enough and you will still hear some well-meaning adult deliver advice to the same effect. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” “Find what you’re passionate about and the rest will follow.” It’s as inevitable as potato salad at a summer cookout. However, some psychologists now suggest it may be less nutritious. Recently, researchers from Stanford and Yale-NUS college (a collaboration between Yale and the University of Singapore) administered a series of tests to look at what they call “implicit theory of interest.” https://qz.com/13...

  How do you listen to music? I don’t mean “Are you a headphones person or more of a speaker fan?” I mean, what parts of your brain do you use? “The same parts of the brain everyone else uses,” you may be tempted to say. But hold on: it’s a little more complicated than that. It turns out that highly empathetic people experience music more deeply than the rest of the population, and there’s a neuroscience reason why. About 20% of the population is considered highly empathetic. These folks are unusually attuned to the emotions of the people around them. They may be overwhelmed by crowds, loud noises, or unusually needy or talkative people . But there are benefits, it seems—and not just the benefits associated with being able to read situations more accurately. In a study —the first of its kind—by Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and UCLA, 20 UCLA undergrad students climbed into an fMRI machine and listened to passages of music either familiar or unfamiliar to t...

Are you likely to fall for a made-up government conspiracy? That depends: how well-informed are you? If you said “very”…bad news, you might be another chump. What gives? A recent study by Joseph Vitriol and Jessecae K. Marsh of Lehigh Unversity found that people who are overconfident in their grasp of the political world are the most likely to also buy into the existence of shadowy organizations and secret connections. Vitriol and Marsh had the study participants rate their understanding of a series of public policies. But here’s the kicker: the subjects then had to provide the most detailed possible explanation of how those policies actually worked. They then had the option to re-evaluate themselves. Many of the participants, bluff called, had to concede—perhaps a bit sheepishly—that they didn’t know as much as they’d thought. However, for some, the act of piecing together an explanation only strengthened their belief that they really got the whole pict...