Jonah Lehrer:

City life isn't easy.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening.

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities.

From the archive:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes.

Consider:

Government policies -- from as early as the 1890s -- subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity.

Finally, Stewart Brand:

What the world has now is new cities with young populations and old cities with old populations. How the dialogue between them plays out will determine much of the nature of the next half century. The convergence of the two major trends, globalization and rampant urbanization, means that all cities are effectively one city now.

The City Hurts Your Brain

Coca-Cola douches were a part of folklore about birth control during the 1950s and 1960s, before effective contraceptive methods were readily available. It was rumored that the acidity of Coca-Cola killed sperm, and the classic coke bottle provided a convenient "shake and shoot" applicator. Recently, an old study from our group confirming the spermicidal effects of various Coca-Cola formulations was awarded the 2008 IgNobel prize in chemistry. The press releases surrounding our IgNobel award might have repopularized this method, and soft drink douches are apparently still used to prevent pregnancy in resource-poor settings. There are, however, many reasons why women should not rely on this method.

From the archive:

Have ever seen a "soft look" at or a "lighthearted take" on teenage pregnancy?

Coca-Cola douches and contraception

Scientists already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they recently discovered is that when a man changes his natural body odor it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

The perfume's effectiveness may have nothing to do with a woman’s appreciation of the smell, and everything to do with its psychological effect on the man wearing it.

From the archive:

Like humans, squirrels must first be familiar with an individual before an odor can become associated with that other animal.

The squirrel kept running and finally stopped when it realized there was still nowhere to go.

Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, noses, taste buds, and skin of inhabitants of England’s pre-Industrial Revolution cities, Hubbub transports us to a world in which residents were scarred by smallpox, refuse rotted in the streets, pigs and dogs roamed free, and food hygiene consisted of little more than spit and polish.

You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume.

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

The scent of a man

Many studies have shown that people display an apparent overconfidence. In particular, it is common for a majority of people to describe themselves as better than average. The literature takes for granted that this better-than-average effect is problematic. We argue, however, that, even accepting these studies completely on their own terms, there is nothing at all wrong with a strict majority of people rating themselves above the median.

From the archive, a HPSCI report from a couple of years back:

We are not looking at Muslims who practice their faith fundamentally -- there is nothing wrong with practicing religion in a fundamental way.

More recently:

Don't think I don't I tolerate gay people because I do. I tolerate them with all my heart.

Overconfidence?

Daniel J. Levitin, in WSJ:

Can science explain why the same song we enjoy singing with relatives or congregants drives us to visions of sugar-plum homicide when it blares across the public-address system Chez Target?

From the archive:

Frink: "Now that I have your attention, we have some exciting new research from young Lisa Simpson. Let's bring her out and pay attention."

Scientist #1: "She's just a little girl!"

Scientist #2: "Let's not listen!"

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Social Networks and Happiness

Henry Greely, and others, in Nature:

Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word.

From the archive:

When imagining the possible influences of efficient cognitive enhancers on society as a whole, there can be many positive effects. Such drugs may enable individuals to perform better and enjoy more achievements and success. However, cognitive enhancers may have a darker side.

Also:

The tasking for this study was to evaluate the potential for adversaries to exploit advances in Human Performance Modification, and thus create a threat to national security.

Oh, Joy!

The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

Bernardo A. Huberman:

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

See also, from February:

We analyze the role that popularity and novelty play in attracting the attention of users to dynamic websites.

From 2007:

Novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.

From 2002:

The amount of money that participants were willing to trade off against status corresponded to the power distance index of the respective culture. The power distance index of a culture has been shown to be correlated with the importance and acceptance of status symbols in that culture. Finally, the amount of status seeking observed was different among men and women, an intriguing observation that deserves further work.

Predicting the popularity of online content

This paper draws distinctions among various concepts related to tipping points, robustness, path dependence, and other properties of system dynamics. For each concept a formal definition is provided that utilizes Markov model representations of systems. We start with the basic features of Markov models and definitions of the foundational concepts of system dynamics. Then various tipping point-related concepts are described, defined, and illustrated with a simplified graphical example in the form of a stylized state transition diagram. The tipping point definitions are then used as a springboard to describe, formally define, and illustrate many distinct concepts collectively referred to as "robustness". The final definitional section explores concepts of path sensitivity and how they can be revealed in Markov models. The definitions provided are presented using probability theory; in addition, each measure has an associated algorithm using matrix operations (excluded from current draft). Finally an extensive future work section indicates many directions this research can branch into and which methodological, conceptual, and practical benefits can be realized through this suite of techniques.

Measures of Tipping Points, Robustness, and Path Dependence

For middle-aged and older people at least, using the internet helps boost brain power, research suggests.

From this summer:

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Internet use 'good for the brain'