Lucky Number…Four?

Posted on 2012/12/012012/12/02 by Jason Hensel

We’ve been lead to believe for decades that the number of items a mind can cope with before it gets confused is seven. This number comes from a 1956 paper by psychologist George Miller titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” In fact, the Psychological Review named it the most influential paper of all time.

However, Gordon Parker, a University of New South Wales professor of psychiatry, says that Miller is incorrect. Parker says the mind works with four “chunks” of information, rather than seven.

“So to remember a seven numeral phone number, say 6458937, we need to break it into four chunks: 64. 58. 93. 7,” Parker said. “Basically four is the limit to our perception. That’s a big difference for a paper that is one of the most highly referenced psychology articles ever–nearly a 100 percent discrepancy.”

Parker suggests that the original paper’s success stems from “more in its multilayered title and Miller’s evocative use of the word ‘magic’,” than in the science.

Still, the mind’s storage capacity limits are unclear, Parker says.

“There may be no limit in storage capacity per se but only a limit to the duration in which items can remain active in short-term memory,” he said. “Regardless, the consensus now is that humans can best store only four chunks in short-term memory tasks.”

This will come in handy when you’re trying to memorize something. Or maybe it doesn’t matter that much anymore, since we can rely on computers and smart phones to access information quickly.

(Story materials via the University of New South Wales. Image via Open Clip Art Library / artefact.)

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Women Identified As More Depressed Than Men

Posted on 2012/11/19 by Jason Hensel

A couple of weeks ago, Christa and I were chatting about how a majority of anti-depression medicine providers market themselves to women. We thought it was interesting that every commercial you see on TV features a depressed woman. It’s one of those things you probably don’t think about until it’s pointed out to you. Then you see it all the time.

And now I’ve seen a new study that fits with this observance. According to research from Viren Swami at the University of Westminster in the U.K., correctly identifying signs of depression depends on the gender of the identifier and the depressed person.

Swami presented study participants with one of two fictitious subjects, Kate and Jack. Both were described in non-clinical terms as having identical symptoms of major depression, the only difference being their suggested gender. For example, a sample of the test reads, “For the past two weeks, Kate/Jack has been feeling really down. S/he wakes up in the morning with a flat, heavy feeling that stick with her/him all day. S/he isn’t enjoying things the way s/he normally would. S/he finds it hard to concentrate on anything.” Respondents were asked to identify whether the individual described suffered a mental health disorder, and how likely they would be to recommend seeking professional help to the subject in the test.

Men and women were equally likely to classify Kate as having a mental health disorder, but men were less likely than women to indicate that Jack suffered from depression. Men were also more likely to recommend that Kate seek professional help than women were, but both men and women were equally likely to make this suggestion for Jack. Respondents, particularly men, rated Kate’s case as significantly more distressing, difficult to treat, and deserving of sympathy than they did Jack’s case.

The researcher also found that individual attitudes towards depression were associated with skepticism about psychiatry and anti-scientific attitudes. According to Swami, their results are significant for initiatives aimed at enhancing mental health literacy, which should consider the impact of gender stereotypes and attitudes towards help-seeking behaviors.

Have you noticed a bias toward women and depression in ads? Do you think women suffer more than men from depression?

(Quotes from the Public Library of Science. Image via Flickr: Luis Sarabia / Creative Commons.)

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Hearing With Your Hands

Posted on 2012/10/292012/10/31 by Jason Hensel

There are people who can’t talk unless they’re gesturing. But maybe their hand movements are doing more than helping them speak. Perhaps they’re helping them hear.

According to researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, what you hear may depend on what your hands are doing.

“Language is processed mainly in the left hemisphere, and some have suggested that this is because the left hemisphere specializes in analyzing very rapidly changing sounds,” said the study’s senior investigator, Peter E. Turkeltaub, M.D., PhD, a neurologist in the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery.

The researchers used a simple noise and indication test on 24 volunteers for the study. They had to press a button when they heard background sounds, which were quick or slow.

“We asked the subjects to respond to sounds hidden in background noise,” Turkeltaub said. “Each subject was told to use his or her right hand to respond during the first 20 sounds, then the left hand for the next 20 second, then right, then left, and so on.”

People who used their right hand heard the rapidly changing sounds more often than when using their left hand. It was vice versa for the slowly changing sounds.

“Since the left hemisphere controls the right hand and vice versa, these results demonstrate that the two hemispheres specialize in different kinds of sounds—the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation,” Turkeltaub said. “These results also demonstrate the interaction between motor systems and perception. It’s really pretty amazing. Imagine you’re waving an American flag while listening to one of the presidential candidates. The speech will actually sound slightly different to you depending on whether the flag is in your left hand or your right hand.”

I think this research is especially interesting for meeting designers and professional speakers. Imagine the ways you could control what your audience hears by simply having attendees hold something. It would be a fun experiment to present two exact sessions (word for word) to different audiences, one that holds something in the left hand and one in the right hand. Then let’s see if session comprehension and scores are different. Anyone willing to try it out?

(Story quotes from Georgetown University. Image via Flickr: Malthe Sigurdsson / Creative Commons)

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Paper Cuts’ Pain Explained

Posted on 2012/10/262012/10/29 by Jason Hensel

As much as I would like to edit materials online, I still do a majority of it on physical paper. And with that comes the risk of paper cuts, which can hurt like hell. Ferris Jabr, an editor from Scientific American, explains in the following video why paper cuts hurt so badly.

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How Negative News Affects Women

Posted on 2012/10/24 by Jason Hensel

Women and men react differently when it comes to bad news. According to a study from the University of Montreal at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital, women’s sensitivity to stressful situations increases after being subjected to negative news. The same negative news doesn’t affect men. The women, though, were better able to recollect what they had learn more so than the men.

“It’s difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there,” said lead author Marie-France Marin. “And what if all that news was bad for us? It certainly looks like that could be the case.”

I’ll let the University of Montreal news center tell you the rest of the story:

The researchers asked 60 people divided into four groups to read actual news stories. In order to determine their stress levels, the researchers took samples of the participants’ saliva and analyzed them for a hormone called cortisol. Higher levels of this bodily chemical indicate higher levels of stress. A group of men and a group of women read “neutral” news stories, about subjects such as the opening of a new park or the premiere of a new film, while the another two gender segregated groups read negative stories, about events such as murders or accidents. Saliva samples were taken again in order to determine the effect of these news stories. “When our brain perceives a threatening situation, our bodies begin to produce stress hormones that enter the brain and may modulate memories of stressful or negative events,” explained Sonia Lupien, Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress and a professor at the university’s Department of Psychiatry. “This led us to believe that reading a negative news story should provoke the reader’s stress reaction.”

The participants were then confronted with a series of standardized tasks involving memory and intellect that enable researchers to evaluate and compare how people react to stressful situations. A final round of samples was then taken to determine the effects of this experience. Finally, the next day, the participants were called back to talk about what they had read. The researchers were surprised by what they found. “Although the news stories alone did not increase stress levels, they did make the women more reactive, affecting their physiological responses to later stressful situations,” Marin explained. The researchers discovered this when they saw that the level of cortisol in the women who have read the negative news was higher after the “stress” part of the experiment compared to the women who have read the neutral news. “Moreover, the women were able to remember more of the details of the negative stories. It is interesting to note that we did not observe this phenomenon amongst the male participants.”

The researchers believe that evolutionary factors may be at play, noting that other scientists have considered whether an emphasis on the survival of offspring may have influenced the evolution of the female stress system, leading women to be more empathetic. This theory would explain why women could be more susceptible to indirect threats. “More studies should be undertaken to better understand how gender, generational differences and other socio-cultural factors affect our experience, as individuals, of the negative information that perpetually surrounds us,” Marin said.

(Image via Flickr: Phoney Nickle / Creative Commons)

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The Positive Impact of a Handshake

Posted on 2012/10/23 by Jason Hensel

Personally, I’m a hugger. However, most of those hugs precede handshakes. One can’t move too fast on the whole getting to know you scale. Plus, shaking hands first eases a stranger’s feelings about you. Don’t believe me? Science says so.

Beckman Institute researcher Florin Dolcos and University of Illinois postdoctoral research associate Sanda Dolcos found that “a handshake preceding social interaction enhanced the positive impact of approach and diminished the negative impact of avoidance behavior on the evaluation of social interaction.”

That makes sense. Their study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, gives scientific proof for the first time about why a handshake is important.

The study showed “increased sensitivity to approach than to avoidance behavior in amygdala and superior temporal sulcus, which were linked to a positive evaluation of approach behavior and a positive impact of handshake.” Also, the “nucleus accumbens, which is a reward processing region, showed greater activity for Handshake than for No-handshake conditions” — proving a link to “the positive effect of handshake on social evaluation.”

“Overall, our study not only replicated previous reports that identify activity in regions of the social cognition network, but also provided insight into the contribution of these regions into evaluating approach and avoidance social interactions, and grant neuroscientific support for the power of a handshake,” Sanda Dolcos said.

Florin Dolcos says that a firm, confident, and friendly handshake leads to positive feelings.

“In a business setting this is what people are expecting, and those who know these things use them,” he said. “Not a very long time ago you could get a loan based on a handshake. So it conveys something very important, very basic. Yet the science underlying this is so far behind. We knew these things intuitively but now we also have the scientific support.”

There you have it. But beware: I’m still giving you a hug when I see you next.

(Story materials and image via the Beckman Institute.)

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Are Your Meetings Making People Dumb?

Posted on 2012/10/142012/10/17 by Jason Hensel

A person’s decision-making performance indoors can be negatively affected by moderately high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂), according to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“The primary source of indoor CO₂ is humans,” wrote Julie Chao for the Berkeley Lab News Center. “While typical outdoor concentrations are around 380 ppm, indoor concentrations can go up to several thousand ppm. Higher indoor CO₂ concentrations relative to outdoors are due to low rates of ventilation, which are often driven by the need to reduce energy consumption. In the real world, CO₂concentrations in office buildings normally don’t exceed 1,000 ppm, except in meeting rooms, when groups of people gather for extended periods of time.”

Meetings, eh? I can already imagine the sensational headline I will write and use: “Are your meetings making people dumb?”

The researchers suggest that it’s too early, though, to make recommendations, as more tests have to be done, especially on a larger scale.

“Assuming it’s replicated, it has implications for the standards we set for minimum ventilation rates for buildings,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, as reported by Chao. “People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this.”

Until then, let’s just have meetings outside when possible. Sound good?

(Image via Flickr: Patrick Lauke / Creative Commons)

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Erasing Fear From Your Brain

Posted on 2012/10/132012/10/15 by Jason Hensel

The emotion of fear can be erased from the brain, according to researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden. Take it away, Uppsala news center:

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

In the study, the researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. In order to activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any accompanying shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture. For a control group, the reconsolidation process was allowed to complete before the subjects were shown the same repeated presentations of the picture.

In that the experimental group was not allowed to reconsolidate the fear memory, the fear they previously associated with the picture dissipated. In other words, by disrupting the reconsolidation process, the memory was rendered neutral and no longer incited fear. At the same time, using a MR-scanner, the researchers were able to show that the traces of that memory also disappeared from the part of the brain that normally stores fearful memories, the nuclear group of amygdala in the temporal lobe.

‘These findings may be a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. Ultimately the new findings may lead to improved treatment methods for the millions of people in the world who suffer from anxiety issues like phobias, post-traumatic stress, and panic attacks,’ says Thomas Ågren.

Does anyone else think about the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind upon reading this news?

(Image via Flickr: jj_judes / Creative Commons)

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Waitresses Wearing Red Get Higher Tips

Posted on 2012/08/03 by Jason Hensel

Red is attractive color. For example, those who drive red cars get pulled over more often than drivers of other car colors. It’s eye catching, and according to a new study published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, it’s profitable, too.

“In their study of 272 restaurant customers, researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob found not only that male patrons gave higher tips than female patrons in general, but that men gave between 14.6 percent and 26.1 percent more to waitresses wearing red, while color had no effect on female patrons’ tipping behavior at all,” stated a press release from SAGE Publications. “The researchers explained that previous research has found that red increases the physical and sexual attractiveness of women.”

The researchers had 11 waitresses wear the same T-shirt in different colors in five restaurants on different days over a six-week period. They told all the waitresses to act as they normally would to all customers and to record how much they received as a tip from each customer.

“As red color has no negative effect on women customers, it could be in their interest to wear red clothes at work,” the researchers said.

And now I can’t get the song “The Lady in Red” out of my head.

(Image via Flickr: Tim Dobbelaere / Creative Commons)

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I’m Sorry, Your Name Is…?

Posted on 2012/06/202012/06/20 by Jason Hensel

I’ve taken improvisation lessons for more than two years now. While it has helped improve my listening skills, I still forget people’s names at times. And as someone who works in the meeting industry, forgetting names is often not a positive trait.

For the longest time, I thought it was my brain’s love of forgetfulness that it increasingly embraces every year. However, it’s not my mind’s mechanics that are at fault. It’s me. According to Richard Harris, a psychology professor at Kansas State University, your level of interest determines your brain’s ability to remember names.

“Some people, perhaps those who are more socially aware, are just more interested in people, more interested in relationships,” Harris said. “They would be more motivated to remember somebody’s name.”

Harris says that the more interest you show in a person, the more likely you’ll remember that person’s name. That’s common sense, but as with most common sense advice, it’s easily forgotten.

To help you remember names, try strategies such as mnemonic devices or saying the person’s name while you talk to the person. Or better yet, as Harris says, just show more interest in people.

(Image via Flickr: Emily Rose / Creative Commons)

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I Was Born This Way

Posted on 2012/04/11 by Jason Hensel

I have trouble being mean. It’s next to impossible to not be nice. Sure, I get in bad moods and can be snippy at times, but overall I’m a nice fellow, you know, finishing last in all. And I’m okay with that most of the time, especially now that I’ve learned I was born this way.

According to psychologists at the University at Buffalo (UB) and the University of California, Irvine, a reason some people are nice is because of their genes. The study “The Neurogenics of Niceness,” appearsthis month in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The researchers studied the behavior of subjects who have versions of receptor genes for two hormones (oxytocin and vasopressin) that are associated with niceness and to find out if these chemicals nudge other forms of pro-social behavior in us.

Subjects were surveyed as to their attitudes toward civic duty, other people and the world in general, and about their charitable activities. Study subjects took part in an Internet survey with questions about civic duty, such as whether people have a duty to report a crime or pay taxes; how they feel about the world, such as whether people are basically good or whether the world is more good than bad; and about their own charitable activities, like giving blood, working for charity or going to PTA meetings.

Of those surveyed, 711 subjects provided a sample of saliva for DNA analysis, which showed what form they had of the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.

“The study found that these genes combined with people’s perceptions of the world as a more or less threatening place to predict generosity,” said Michel Poulin, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at UB. “Specifically, study participants who found the world threatening were less likely to help others–unless they had versions of the receptor genes that are generally associated with niceness.”

These “nicer” versions of the genes, Poulin says, “allow you to overcome feelings of the world being threatening and help other people in spite of those fears.”

“So if one of your neighbors seems really generous, caring, civic-minded kind of person, while another seems more selfish, tight-fisted and not as interested in pitching in, their DNA may help explain why one of them is nicer than the other,” he said. “We aren’t saying we’ve found the niceness gene. But we have found a gene that makes a contribution. What I find so interesting is the fact that it only makes a contribution in the presence of certain feelings people have about the world around them.”

(Story materials provided by the University at Buffalo.)

(Image via Flickr: Jason Liebig / Creative Commons)

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Exercise Can Lead to Female Orgasm

Posted on 2012/03/21 by Jason Hensel

Exercising doesn’t thrill me. I tried running four miles one time, and I was in a terrible mood afterwards. The exercise high just eludes me. But not for women.

According to a recent study out of Indiana University, exercise (not including sex or fantasies) can lead to female orgasm.

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” said Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

Key study findings include:

About 40 percent of women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP) had done so on more than 10 occasions.
Most of the women in the EIO group reported feeling some degree of self-consciousness when exercising in public places, with about 20 percent reporting they could not control their experience.
Most women reporting EIO said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences.
Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent), and walking/hiking (9.6 percent).

“Magazines and blogs have long highlighted cases of what they sometimes call ‘coregasms,'” Herbenick said. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues, this is an area of women’s sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades.”

Yeah, she just said coregasms. Feel free to use that in your daily conversations.

(Image via Flickr: Dan Machold / Creative Commons)

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