TOK@ISPrague

Thanks to new research out of MIT, you might one day be able to subtly manipulate your picture to make it more memorable — meaning that people should be more likely to remember your face. According to the research article: "One ubiquitous fact about people is that we cannot avoid evaluating the faces we see in daily life ... In this flash judgment of a face, an underlying decision is happening in the brain — should I remember this face or not? Even after seeing a picture for only half a second we can often remember it." There are subjective factors affecting how a face sticks in your memory — for example, if you know someone else who looks similar, you might find a new face more familiar. But researchers found that there is also a strong universal component to memorability. Some faces are just consistently more easily remembered.

“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”

Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.

The marshmallow study captured the public imagination because it is a funny story, easily told, that appears to reduce the complex social and psychological question of why some people succeed in life to a simple, if ancient, formulation: Character is destiny. Except that in this case, the formulation isn’t coming from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus or from a minister preaching that “patience is a virtue” but from science, that most modern of popular religions.

But how our brains work is just one of many factors that drive the choices we make. Just last year, a study by researchers at the University of Rochester called the conclusions of the Stanford experiments into question, showing that some children were more likely to eat the first marshmallow when they had reason to doubt the researcher’s promise to come back with a second one. In the study, published in January 2013 in Cognition under the delectable title “Rational Snacking,” Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin wrote that for a child raised in an unstable environment, “the only guaranteed treats are the ones you have already swallowed,” while a child raised in a more stable environment, in which promises are routinely delivered upon, might be willing to wait a few more minutes, confident that he will get that second treat.

Willpower can do only so much for children facing domestic instability, poor physical health or intellectual deficits.

responding to the widespread social upheaval spreading throughout his country, yemeni artist and activist murad sobay initiated the ’12th hour’ campaign — a series of street art murals, paintings, and graffiti that discuss 12 cultural concerns the country is currently engaged in. the artworks are emblazoned across the walls of the yemeni capital of sana’a, and unfold as an hour-by-hour series, all in pursuit of cultivating awareness of the problems in a peaceful and participatory way. the project is sustained by a massive public response — initiated through a call-to-action on facebook. citizens demonstrate their interest in the creative campaign by taking to the streets with sobay and painting the walls with powerful messages about government and policy. the walls transform into expository stories, which shed light on the consequences of anti-government demonstrations and alternatively encourage a non-violent discourse.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the very recent news events are the ones we remember best. The Japanese psychologist Terumasa Kogure found sharp drops in recollection at four years and eight years after an event, but sometimes we’ll remember the details of far older news stories. Indeed, recent psychological research shows that our memory for news is not as straightforward as we might think — and the reasons offer insight into how the mind works.

The movie grew out of a conversation Mr. Jenison had with Penn Jillette in which he casually remarked that he thought he had figured out how the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was able to produce canvases so lifelike that they still mystify painters and art historians alike.

The secret, suggested Mr. Jenison, whose role in inventing the “video toaster” means he is sometimes called “the father of desktop video,” was the canny use of mirror-based optical devices. So he set out to test his hypothesis by painting his own stroke-by-stroke version of Vermeer’s “Music Lesson” in a Texas warehouse, with Teller, the quieter half of the duo, documenting every advance and reverse as Mr. Jenison experimented with the optical equipment he thinks Vermeer used.

In an attempt to reduce these figures, substance abuse prevention programs often educate pupils regarding the perils of drug use, teach students social skills to resist peer pressure to experiment, and help young people feel that saying no is socially acceptable. All the approaches seem sensible on the surface, so policy makers, teachers and parents typically assume they work. Yet it turns out that approaches involving social interaction work better than the ones emphasizing education. That finding may explain why the most popular prevention program has been found to be ineffective—and may even heighten the use of some substances among teens.

Cuijpers reported that the most effective ones involve substantial amounts of interaction between instructors and students. They teach students the social skills they need to refuse drugs and give them opportunities to practice these skills with other students—for example, by asking students to play roles on both sides of a conversation about drugs, while instructors coach them about what to say and do. In addition, programs that work take into account the importance of behavioral norms

“I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on? The question predates Berger’s interest in it by centuries. In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos.