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When it comes to making decisions on the fly, we sacrifice accuracy for speed. It’s true for humans, and it’s true for most other species — rapid fire answers are less likely to be correct. Called the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), and while we know it’s a thing, the scientific basis for it has been poorly understood. However, a new paper is claiming to have unlocked how the brain handles this — and it’s turning the traditional model on its head.

The data suggests that when faced with a problem, activity of the prefrontal cortex neurons are amplified when speed is required, and suppressed when accuracy is paramount.

This is contrary to the current theory, which thinks that our brain uses the same processes for all types of decision. The data from this study seems to suggest that our minds deal with information in a different way, depending on what we want of it. Schall said:

What this means is that identical information presented to the brain is analyzed differently under speed stress than under accuracy stress.

Note, the actual research was into monkeys.

[W]hat lessons can other developers and publishers learn from the way Valve works? We’ve pinpointed four key aspects from the handbook’s text that others can emulate.

1. Have a sense of humor […]

2. Care for your employee’s families […]

3. Treat your employees like adults […]

4. Mitigate the fear of failure […]

[related: Valve, a Video Game Maker With Few Rules (Game Maker Without a Rule Book)]

Just about every organization, every online service, every product and every element of our culture now has chat rooms and forums devoted to a few people looking for something to complain about. Some of them even do it on television.

The fascinating truth is this: the people in these forums aren’t doing their best work. They rarely identify useful feedback or pinpoint elements that can be changed productively either. In fact, if you solved whatever problem they’re whining about, they wouldn’t suddenly become enthusiastic contributors. No, they’re just wallowing in the negative ions, enjoying the support of a few others as they dish about what’s holding them back.

It pays no dividends to go looking for useful insight from these folks. Go make something great instead.

Despite caffeine’s shaky reputation in the past, there’s more and more convincing evidence that it’s not only not so bad for us, but in some ways, may actually be quite good for us. It’s the most popular neurostimulant in the world (of the legal ones, anyway), according the authors of a new study that uses brain imaging to look at how caffeine exerts its wondrous effects on the brain. And that description isn’t total hyperbole – previous research has shown caffeine to reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The new study gives us some of the first clues in humans as to why this may be.

Adenosine receptors are found throughout the brain and body. In the brain, adenosine builds up throughout the day, ultimately making us feel tired by the end of it. But caffeine is a brilliant adenosine mimic – so, taking the place of adenosine, it blocks those receptors and keeps us feeling chipper and alert.

In very high doses, of course, caffeine is not so good for you, and, in the form of energy drinks, has recently been the subject of some serious concern. But if you’re in the “moderate” use group, you may be OK to continue your habit, if you’re not experiencing any unwanted side effects. In fact, it may be a very smart move for your brain.

Finding out the music that someone else likes seems to give you a lot of information about them quickly. A study by Peter Rentfrow, and Sam Gosling published in Psychological Science in 2006 found that college students getting to know each other over the internet are more likely to ask about music preferences than about all other categories of conversation topics combined. This research also found that knowing someone’s music preferences allowed students to do a reasonable job of predicting some of the new person’s personality characteristics and values. Personality characteristics are the basic dimensions of behavior along which people differ. Values are beliefs and goals that influence how people approach the world.

In the end, of course, we can’t know from this research whether music influences values or values influence the music people like (or both). That is, people may generally spend time with others who share their values.In these social settings, music is often shared, and the music you hear affects what music you like.So, sharing values could cause music preference.

The writer Jeffrey Goldsmith was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a famous article asking if the game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov had invented “a pharmatronic?” – a video game with the potency of an addictive drug. Some people say that after playing the game for hours they see falling blocks in their dreams or buildings move together in the street – a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect. Such is its mental pull, there’s even been the suggestion that the game might be able to prevent flashbacks in people with PTSD.

Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. Snooker, or pool if you are non-British, is a good example. … Tetris adds a computer-powered engine to this basic scenario – not only must the player tidy up, but the computer keeps throwing extra blocks from the sky to add to the mess. It looks like a perfect example of a pointless exercise – a game that doesn’t teach us anything useful, has no wider social or physical purpose, but which weirdly keeps us interested.

There’s a textbook psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. In the 1930s, Zeigarnik was in a busy cafe and heard that the waiters had fantastic memories for orders – but only up until the orders had been delivered.

Tetris holds our attention by continually creating unfinished tasks. Each action in the game allows us to solve part of the puzzle, filling up a row or rows completely so that they disappear, but is also just as likely to create new, unfinished work. A chain of these partial-solutions and newly triggered unsolved tasks can easily stretch to hours, each moment full of the same kind of satisfaction as scratching an itch.

The other reason why Tetris works so well is that each unfinished task only appears at the same time as its potential solution – those blocks continuously fall from the sky, each one a problem and a potential solution. … Unlike so much of life, Tetris makes an immediate connection between our insight into how we might solve a problem and the means to begin acting on it.

The Zeigarnik Effect describes a phenomenon, but it doesn’t really give any reason for why it happens. This is a common trick of psychologists, to pretend they solved a riddle of the human mind by giving it a name, when all they’ve done is invented an agreed upon name for the mystery rather than solved it. A plausible explanation for the existence of the Effect is that the mind is designed to reorganise around the pursuit of goals. If those goals are met, then the mind turns to something else.

Trivia takes advantage of this goal orientation by frustrating us until it is satisfied. Tetris goes one step further, and creates a continual chain of frustration and satisfaction of goals. Like a clever parasite, Tetris takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in getting things done and uses it against us. We can go along with this, enjoying the short-term thrills in tidying up those blocks, even while a wiser, more reflective, part of us knows that the game is basically purposeless. But then all good games are, right?

I also went through a Tetris-obsessed phase, until work and life itself provided me with enough never-ending opportunities to try tidying things up.

The research finds that a statement in the presence of images or other additional information enhances people’s feelings of truthiness, even when they don’t provide any evidence the statement is true. This is especially important in the context of political campaigns, as it suggests that that the mere presence of a picture next to a candidate’s written claims could lead people to be more likely to believe them. And the work is another demonstration of the ease with which our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors can be manipulated through relatively innocuous means.

The fact that irrelevant pictures alter our perceptions of truth is related to a general principle about the way our minds work. Our judgments are based on not only the information we’re considering, but the way in which that information is processed and organized. The ease with which information is processed has long been known to lead to specific biases. The reasoning works as follows: when considering some piece of new information, an individual will attempt to remember other bits of consistent information. The more easily these bits of information are retrieved, the more likely the new information is going to be tagged as true. So, if you are told, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than it’s brain,” you will attempt to recall all the information you know about ostriches, eyes, and brains. The easier you bring this information to mind, the more likely you are to decide that the statement is true (spoiler: it’s true).

With profound apologies to Colbert, these findings suggest we would all be wise to be more critical of our feelings of truthiness. Is that health claim on your cereal box accompanied by a picture? Do the safety claims of the car ad in your magazine appear alongside other information about the vehicle? Does the assertion of a fact on a website appear next to a photo of the writer? Given that we will live with the consequences of this presidential elections for the next four years, we should pay close attention not only to the information presented by the candidates, but also the manner in which they present that information. There are many instances in which trusting the truth which comes from your gut could mean that you’re subscribing to something less than the truth. In other words: if it feels good, question it.

Your personality is revealed in the way you speak, according to new research. Introverts tend to use more concrete words and are more precise, in contrast to extraverts, whose words are more abstract and vague.

Participants who scored higher in extraversion tended to describe the photos in terms that were rated by an independent coder as more abstract. For example, they used more “state verbs” (e.g. Jack loves Sue) and adjectives, and they admitted to engaging in more interpretation - describing things that were not directly visible in the pictures. On the other hand, the higher a person scored in introversion, the more concrete and precise their speech tended to be, including more use of articles (i.e. “a”, “the”), more mentions of numbers and specific people, and making more distinctions (i.e. use of words like “but” and “except”).

The differences make sense in terms of what we know about social behaviour and the introvert-extravert personality dimension, with the introverted linguistic style being more cautious, and the extravert style being more casual and vague.

“By talking at different levels of abstraction, extraverts and introverts report information differently,” the researchers concluded, “and induce different recipient inferences, memories, and subsequent representations of the information exchanged.”

This may also help explain why its hard for people at different ends of the introvert-extravert spectrum convince each other in an argument (in addition to having to overcome each other’s biases).