learning

We know that flattery, a form of social reward, is a powerful tool. In Flattery Will Get You Somewhere, we saw that complimenting an individual made them feel more positively about the person bestowing the favorable comments, even when they…

Here's another rare foray into neuro-parenting. In How to Praise Your Child, I described research that showed telling your child he/she is smart could actually backfire and have negative effects on performance. It turns out there's…

There's more evidence that playing video games can improve your brain in ways that go beyond an ability to get higher scores in those games:

In Managing by Mistakes, I wrote about the power of learning from mistakes. Some of the most successful individuals in different fields credit relentless focus on even small mistakes with their high achievement. Researchers at Columbia…

I don't often get into neuro-parenting here, but I thought this particular research finding was interesting enough to single out. (I mentioned it in my Managing by Mistakes post last week, too.) The short story is that a lot of what…

Food marketers love hungry customers as they are certainly in a state where tantalizing images may be particularly effective. Oddly, it turns out that hungry people may take in all kinds of information more quickly. The New York Times…

While the term "infovore" has been kicking around for a while as a cute name for a consumer of information, the University of Southern California's Irving Biederman is using the term to describe humans exhibiting a more specific kind of…