Music Software Predicts The Hits

Many of us like to believe that there's a little magic behind the making of a hit single. Take a song like "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas. That's a good song, judging by sales: It's on top of the Billboard pop chart. David Meredith, CEO of Music Intelligence Solutions, says there's no magic in that; it's math. His software, called Hit Song Science, gave the song a hit score of 8.9 out 10.

"[It's] a series of algorithms that we use to look at what's the potential of a song to be sticky with a listener," Meredith says. "To have those patterns in the music that would correspond with what human brain waves would find pleasing."

Via NPR.org

Understanding the Anxious Mind

"The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in — thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming — it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain."

--The New York Times, Magazine September 29, 2009 HERE.

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

"At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend."

--The New York Times, September 25, 2009 HERE.

More happiness may come with age, studies say

"A Pew Research Center study found that the happiest men are ages 60 to 69, while the least happy are ages 20 to 29.

With the exception of those with age-dementia, mental health tends to improve as people get older, researchers said at the APA meeting."

From CNN article by Elizabeth Landau, More happiness may come with age, studies say, published August 11, 2009.

Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop

"Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

"Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

From The New York Times. August 17, 2009. Whole article here.

What Makes Us Happy?

Talk of the Nation, June 1, 2009 ·
Journalist Joshua Wolf Shenk gained access to one of the most comprehensive studies conducted to find the formula for happiness. "What Makes Us Happy?" is his essay in the June issue of The Atlantic. Shenk, along with Todd Kashdan, professor of psychology and author of Curious: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, explore what makes us happy. here.

Using Psychology To Save You From Yourself

Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, supports policies that use psychology research to create behavioral incentives.

From NPR's All Things Considered, June 8, 2009 here.

Is This Your Brain On God?

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

Series from NPR here.

Are Spiritual Encounters All In Your Head?

According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality.

So, have you ever wondered whether those encounters actually happened — or whether they were all in your head? Scientists say the answer might be both.

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty for All Things Considered on NPR, May 19, 2009

Don’t! The secret of self-control.

probably the best article I've read in a long time. All about 'The secret of self-control'

"The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research. 'There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.'
"Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds."

Article from The New Yorker, published May 18, 2009 by Jonah Lehrer

The God Chemical: Brain Chemistry And Mysticism

Chemistry of mysticism? Rad.

"Some researchers are using new technologies to try to understand spiritual experience. They're peering into our brains and studying our bodies to look for circumstantial evidence of a spiritual world."

From NPR's All Things Considered, May 18, 2009 article.

Compassion: Easier For A Broken Leg Than Heart

Antonio Damasio (the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at USC and the director of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute) says brain scans showed that even the most complex psychological emotions engaged many of the same brain systems that responded to physical states.

That suggests these emotions "go deep in our brain and they also go deep in our body, in our flesh," he says.

But Immordino-Yang notes that it took the brain up to six seconds to react to a complex emotion like emotional pain, while reactions to physical pain occurred almost instantly. Reactions to emotional pain also took much longer to dissipate.

That raises questions about the effects of news programs and video games in which a traumatic psychological event may flash by in a just a second or two, Damasio says.

He says that might not be long enough for children who are still learning compassion.

"What if it is happening to a child who does not have parents or a guardian around who can say, well, 'Wait a minute, there are terrible implications for the person who just underwent that particular event'?" Damasio says.

Without that sort of help, some children may not acquire the full range of compassion for other people, Damasio says. They also might not develop admiration for people who do virtuous things.

Damasio says that would be a big problem because compassion and admiration help anchor moral systems — and society itself.

Compassion: Easier For A Broken Leg Than Heart by Jon Hamilton on NPR.