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the reason you are not seeing the yellow dots is due to a phenomenon called sensory overload. As the grid around the green dot rotates, and the yellow dots remain unmoving and unchanging, the brain processes the yellow dots as unnecessary information and blanks them out. The brain, after all, does not automatically process all information, visual or otherwise, that the body’s sensory systems encounter. If it did, it would overload, so it tends to filter out information that it has repeatedly encountered without change. The Yale study suggests something else. Instead of the brain automatically removing pieces of unchanging information from view due to sensory overload, the mind is in fact perceiving the objects as contrary to the logic of real-life perceptions. The brain simply does not accept that the object can logically exist based on what information it has. Thus, they disappear from view – they become perceptual scotomas.

Kids discover lying as early as age 2, studies have found. In one experiment, children were asked not to peek at a toy hidden behind them while the researcher withdrew from the room under false pretenses. Minutes later, the researcher returned and asked the child if he or she peeked.

"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one. This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas." There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.

A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.

“You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”

International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”

One of the more benign aspects of Chinese medicine is acupuncture, a practice deemed superstitious in China in the 17th century until Mao Zedong reemployed it for political purposes in the fifties. Two decades later it infiltrated the American imagination. A myth was reborn. As Jeneen Interlandi writes, research results have been murky at best—one 2013 report of over 3,000 studies showed acupuncture to be no more effective than placebos.

What makes one human better at talking about odors than another? Are English speakers flawed smellers, or are the hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula exceptional? Advertisement Continue reading the main story The answer might come down partly to culture, suggests a study published Thursday in Current Biology.

The researcher who met with S. that day was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Luria, whose fame as a founder of neuropsychology still lay before him. Luria began reeling off lists of random numbers and words and asking S. to repeat them, which he did, in ever-lengthening series. Even more remarkably, when Luria retested S. more than fifteen years later, he found those numbers and words still preserved in S.’s memory. “I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” Luria writes in his famous case study of S., “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” published in 1968 in both Russian and English.

Swearing, Stephens thinks, may be a form of pain management, maybe even empowerment. Last week, he and a colleague, David K. Spierer, of Long Island University, described a new study in which swearing seemed to bolster physical strength.

One of Britain’s most respected Tudor historians has expressed concern that prospective students imagine Hilary Mantel’s novels are fact. John Guy told the Hay literary festival in Wales that Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels needed to be enjoyed for what they were: fiction. Mantel’s two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have been a literary phenomenon, both winning the Man Booker prize and being adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company. But they are novels, said Guy, despite what some applicants he interviews to study history at Cambridge seem to think.