The best time to come up with novel ideas might be when you're most tired, new research suggests. Mareike Wieth of Albion University surveyed students to see which ones were night owls and which were early birds and then gave them analytical and creative problem-solving tests at different times of the day. Each group did its best work on the creative problems when they were most likely to be dragging physically. The results fit with the idea that we are more creative when our mental focus is more diffuse.
Why do we agree to do things that we later regret, whether it's buying a risky stock or agreeing to give a public talk? George Loewenstein calls it the "empathy gap." When he uses that term, the Carnegie Mellon University researcher is not talking about our inability to relate to others but our inability to know how our future selves will feel. In an experiment with colleagues at the University of Colorado, Mr. Loewenstein asked students if they would be willing to tell a funny story or dance to James Brown's "Sex Machine" in front of classmates, in exchange for money. Students underestimated how embarrassed they would be when the time came to perform, his team found -- unless they first watched short films that evoked fear or anger. The ones who experienced those emotions were more likely to accurately predict how embarrassed they'd be later on when they had to rock out to "shake your arm, then use your form, stay on the scene like a sex machine."
A long-running study in the United Kingdom has found that both men and women steadily decline in cognitive ability from age 45 on, although the dropoff is much more significant after age 65. The Whitehall II study at University College London, which followed more than 5,000 men and more than 2,000 women, found that both groups performed about 3.6 percent worse on cognitive tests from age 45 to 49. From age 65 to 70, men's scores dropped 9.6 percent, while women's declined 7.4 percent.
Harvard professor Adam Cohen has achieved a breakthrough in studying living neurons. His team has taken an organism from the Dead Sea that lights up when it is exposed to an electrical signal and figured out how to incorporate it into living neurons in the lab. That allows researchers to see signals as they move from one neuron to another. Among other things, it one day may allow doctors to grow neurons from a person with a specific disorder in the lab and then test how different drugs affect the functioning of the neurons in real time.
First Published: January 23, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
