iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Technology is instrumental in the progress in healthcare, but lack of technology is not the obstacle to faster treatment development. In this brief, compelling TED talk. @scientificdiscovery.dev sets out how innovations in other domains can accelerate progress: buff.ly/s60PRkO

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Humans are the only species that can throw well enough to kill rivals and prey. Because of the complex mechanics involved across multiple body parts, this expert throwing capacity likely evolved over a lengthy period in our ancestors: buff.ly/QDRZmLD

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Bold, charismatic CEOs may impress the general public with their bestselling memoirs, but not the securities analysts. New research suggests they tend to give less favourable recommendations to stock of firms run by narcissists: buff.ly/yOLt9UK

Research in Italy by Piccitto finds that, on average, women report higher job satisfaction compared to men, specifically for variables like pay and job stability, with a small or insignificant gap for career opportunities and colleague relationships: buff.ly/uhzOa0Z

Een geboorte brengt ouders met een kinderwens geluk. Twee kinderen = een kind + een kind. Zijn de ouders met een tweede kleine (of met een tweeling) dubbel zo gelukkig? … Is dat niet vreemd? Mijn nieuwe stukje—Wanneer de som niet klopt: buff.ly/qCJJ9I7

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If you sometimes find the institutional response to a problem baffling, frustrating or infuriating, this exceptionally brief post and concise but comprehensive diagram by @polemictmm will instantly boost your insight (your affect may be unaffected tho): buff.ly/xTR1JP2

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Blogged: When the numbers don't add up We put numbers to pain and pleasure, or to values in tradeoffs or dilemmas, we may be tempted to perform normal additive/ multiplicative arithmetic to work out what’s best to do. But does that really work? buff.ly/DrtTkjA

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Research by Doshi & Hauser suggests that stories by authors accessing generative AI are more creative, better written, and more enjoyable (especially among less creative writers), but also more similar to each other, than stories written by humans alone. buff.ly/dRwvGtd

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Everyone lies, and a surprisingly common tendency is lying on psychological self-reports—known as ‘supernormality’. That is a headache for researchers whose work relies on self-reports, but there’s a new way to sniff them out: buff.ly/KGwEMUA

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When we imagine athletes training, we tend to think of physical training. But what about the psychology? What is the role of the mind in athletic performance? Lessons from sports psychology research: buff.ly/7zmXjIo

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Time feels like it’s speeding up—and it’s not just older people reporting this, it’s from boomer to zoomer. This has been gaining enough traction for scientists to start taking notice, and Mike Mariani is on the case—we’re lacking boredom: buff.ly/nicaYZA

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Should numbers—calculation and logical reasoning—drive our decisions? Or is it just that, sometimes, our gut concurs with what they suggest, but it really is our gut that has the final say? ICYMI, last call for my post: buff.ly/8tG3n0o

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A smile is a message—and that implies complex decoding and encoding. This involves a complex, layered choreography in the brain, writes @wmhaseltine—smiles are carefully timed conversations between the brain, the body, and our social relationships: buff.ly/eUQOCno

An n=1 case of cancer—in which Sid Sijbrandij went ‘founder mode’ when his conventional treatment for osteosarcoma ran out of road—hints at a possible future for personalized treatment that can and should be more broadly accessible: buff.ly/YvQPRKR

Birds of a feather… Meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analyses of 133 traits by Horwitz et al find widespread evidence of mate similarity, particularly for social attitudes, education, and substance use traits: buff.ly/uFga4jt

Is pornography addictive? It is complex, this article by three researchers explains: buff.ly/HNLruzi

As tariffs hit and import prices soared, what better time for the makers of the Monopoly game to produce a “Made in America” version to commemorate the US’s 250th anniversary? It didn’t quite work out as expected in this lesson in comparative advantage: buff.ly/r9epfZn

Research by Boyer & Chantland supports evolutionary psychology theory of victim blaming as solution for cooperation dilemmas—it allows you to avoid the costs of helping victims without risking reputational damage as a poor cooperator yourself: buff.ly/GQyi2ml

Pursuing happiness primarily through ‘energized’ states (eg interest, engagement, enthusiasm) may not be the best approach. New longitudinal research suggests life satisfaction is more strongly linked to a different kind of positive emotion: buff.ly/Tilhg9u

Equally energetic result, made with less energy—the ultrasonic espresso machine: buff.ly/eYZTd2d

The 69-year old guy who memorized pi to 111,000 digits forgot his wife’s birthday. The biggest misconception about memory is that it should be perfect, says @lisagenova.bsky.social—everyone forgets. All you wanted to know about your memory and how to protect it: buff.ly/EhnfSZx

Sleep out of sync with your circadian clock? Catch some 🌞 early in the day. Researchers in Brazil found adults who spent more time in the morning sun had a more aligned internal biological clock, which in turn can promote healthier sleep patterns: buff.ly/152iFDx

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We are all nodes in a Dunbar network—but not all nodes are the same. Most of us focus on the close ties; superspreaders keep a balance between strong and weak connections. Such diversity is key for effective communication, writes Gerald Ashley: buff.ly/w0i1q7B

The taste of numbers New research suggests people associate numbers in brand names of food and drink with flavour—all the more so if the numbers are spelled out in full (via the signalling of complexity): buff.ly/lKcmhEI

Research by Charness & Sutter suggests group decisions are more likely to follow standard game-theory; individuals’ to be subject to biases, cognitive limitations and social considerations, Individual choices are thus poor predictors of group choices: buff.ly/a15UyG7

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Three schools take three different perspectiveson expertise—Expert Performance–stored in memory Embodied Cognition–emerges from interaction w/ environment Naturalistic Decision Making–constructed from patterns @docgrawitch argues it’s all of the above: buff.ly/sWvjFY9

How close are conscious AIs? New paper by Chandaria et al at Google DeepMind proposes a hierarchical framework for assessing consciousness. Current LLMs would score between <0.01 and 0.8 (human = 1), showing the sensitivity to assumptions: buff.ly/WRO8HlJ

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What made an investor on the tv show Dragons’ Den cast aside his misgivings about the finances of a business being pitched, and offer the founders the investment they asked without even negotiating? Easy: it’s an instinct as old as life itself: buff.ly/8tG3n0o

Higher IQ is correlated with success, but that is often confounded by incentives at school or work (intelligent people might also be working harder). New research suggests high-IQ people are successful also when incentives don’t matter, writes @ewdolan: buff.ly/Xp2jluD

Stem cells “can reprogram themselves to carry out the function of virtually any other type of cell, and play a vital role in early development. This functional reprogramming is usually accompanied by an age reset, down to zero.” buff.ly/8w9IR45

Wild times in the mid-19th century. Read why there is a statue of a little boy and a large Bengal tiger at London’s Tobacco Dock: buff.ly/ULCqNvV

Is business ethics an oxymoron? It doesn’t have to be, writes in-house ethicist John Paul Rollert, surveying how it has evolved over the last half century, and exploring how to prevent it from becoming one: buff.ly/NwHBSPL

A chronic drinker’s brain has switched from using glucose as fuel to acetate—a byproduct of the liver breaking down ethanol. New research suggests this switch can reverse in just a few weeks, which can help moderate withdrawal symptoms: buff.ly/TbxAida

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Research by Virtanen & Kaakkinen suggests people read tweets from credible sources saying something belief-inconsistent, or from noncredible sources saying something belief-consistent more slowly, and pay more attention to the sources: buff.ly/D2VYn35

The first amoebae weren’t capable of handling numbers—and neither were its descendants, for billions of years. Yet they made good life-and-death decisions. *We can* count and calculate, but our decisions too still rely on those ancient mechanisms: buff.ly/8tG3n0o

The amusing evolutionary conundrum of whether the egg preceded the chicken or vice versa has a more serious stablemate: in humans, did culture, or intelligence come first? @peter_turchin argues it is culture—the social transmission of information: buff.ly/rRSzzBR

Advertising is persuading. Sometimes the thing is not what you say, but who says it, and to whom. Dave Trott tells the story how the prospective viewers of a new channel were persuaded to persuade the cable tv companies to carry that new channel: buff.ly/OyAwB56

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Unsurprisingly, ethanol—ubiquitous in nature—is widely consumed by animals. Research by Bowmans et al explores its nutritional and non-nutritional effects, with potential medicinal value or cognitive effects (with social–behavioural benefits): buff.ly/DKQ3AJt

It may not be easy to describe what an intelligent person would look like, but we’d probably not consider someone talking loudly to themselves, or someone who uses swear words as particularly intelligent. We might be wrong: buff.ly/DCjlcZY

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