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The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.

"They describe this gigantic wave coming very far inland and killing everybody except those who were up on the mountaintops, and they actually name all the different locations where people survived," says Mr Hamacher. He and Mr Goff took core samples from locations between 500m and 1km (0.6 miles) inland, and at each spot, they found a layer of ocean sediment, about 2m down, indicating that a tsunami likely washed over the area hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years ago. The samples need further analysis but Mr Hamacher says it is a "very exciting" result that suggests the legend could be true.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

The team of researchers, led by Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins University, examined over eighteen thousand studies that assessed the effects of various types of meditation.

Aggregating the results of the 47 studies that met the researchers’ methodological requirements, they measured meditation impact on a litany of stress-related criteria: anxiety, depression, stress and distress, positive mood, mental health-related quality of life, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, pain, and weight. Mantra-based programs showed no benefits over and above placebos. + Does that mean that meditation doesn’t work? Not necessarily. Placebo effects are both real and beneficial, and the relaxation that stems from chanting mantras may be therapeutic in and of itself.

Furthermore, mindfulness meditation—a variant that stems from the Buddhist tradition and involves fostering a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment—was found by Goyal’s group to decrease anxiety and depression.

The most simplistic of climate deniers are those who looked out their windows this winter, saw that it was snowing, and reasoned that global warming therefore can’t be real. This speaks to a basic confusion of the difference between weather and climate. (If you’d like a much more thorough debunking of weather-based climate change denial, read this.)It’s also a classic example of confirmation bias: Deniers get giddy when it snows because it appears to confirm their belief that Earth isn’t really getting warmer. To understand why that doesn’t make sense, one need only look at the average global temperatures. Yes, it was very cold in parts of the U.S., but zoom out and it becomes clear that last month, overall, was the fourth-warmest January in recorded history.In some cases, it could be a fear of science that is driving this type of thinking.

A misunderstanding of what scientists take as “proof” may also be responsible for this confusion.

For a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Grace M. Larson, a graduate student at Northwestern University, and David A. Sbarra, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, looked at self-reflection through a speaking exercise. They recruited 210 young people (they ranged in age from 17 to 29) who had recently broken up with their partners, and then split this brokenhearted sample into two groups. One filled out a questionnaire on how they were feeling, then completed a four-minute assignment in which they were asked to talk into a recording device, free-associating in response to questions like, “When did you first realize you and your partner were headed toward breaking up?” This group repeated the same exercise three, six and nine weeks later. The second group filled out the questionnaire at the beginning and the end of the nine-week study period (they did the speaking exercise only once, after filling out their final questionnaires).