decision-making isn’t logical, it’s emotional, according to the latest findings in neuroscience.

A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery

So at the point of decision, emotions are very important for choosing. In fact even with what we believe are logical decisions, the very point of choice is arguably always based on emotion.

Emotions, when they are not disordered, provide information about your circumstances in a simple, quick way that does not involve a lot of cognition (thinking about it).

Emotions serve a purpose, informing you, the operator of your body, what to do.

Your emotional system can give you an advantage in decision making if you make proper use of it.

There are as many definitions of critical thinking as there are writers about it.

"The purpose of critical thinking is, therefore, to achieve understanding, evaluate view points, and solve problems

In addition, it stresses the need for instruction and student activity to progress from lower to higher levels of critical analysis.

 National assessments in virtually every subject indicate that, although our students can perform basic skills pretty well, they are not doing well on thinking and reasoning.

Textbooks in this country typically pay scant attention to big ideas, offer no analysis, and pose no challenging questions

Critical thinking is based on two assumptions: first, that the quality of our thinking affects the quality of our lives, and second, that everyone can learn how to continually improve the quality of his or her thinking.

Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomena. (In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a mathematical relationship.) Use of the hypothesis to predict other phenomena or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters.

As Professor Wolfs mentions above, "personal and cultural beliefs influence both our perceptions and our interpretations of natural phenomena."

In summary, science is a social enterprise. Scientists are human and share the same weaknesses as all members of the human race.

In contrast to the squalid, puritanical and thoroughly regimented life of 1984's Oceania, American life today is increasingly anarchic and self-indulgent.

Accordingly, Holocaust revisionism is vilified with particular vehemence, almost invariably by individuals who have obviously never made the slightest effort to discover what revisionists have actually written

One of the great strengths of historical revisionism in its struggle for public acceptance is that it holds the moral high ground.

Our reluctance to talk about death is often taken as evidence that we are afraid, and therefore suppress thoughts about it. However, there is little direct evidence to support that we are. So what is a “normal” amount of death anxiety? And how does it manifest itself?

Judging by studies using questionnaires, we seem more bothered by the prospect of losing our loved ones than we do about dying ourselves.

Reminders of death also affect our political and religious beliefs in interesting ways. On the one hand, they polarise us: political liberals become more liberal while conservatives become more conservative. Similarly, religious people tend to assert their beliefs more fervently while nonreligious people disavow more.

When we think of success, we often picture rather brutal characters who will happily trample over others’ feelings in the pursuit of fame and fortune. It’s not hard to imagine how such individuals could win in a cut-throat world.

Previous evidence had suggested that psychopathy is slightly more common among high-flying CEOs than the general population

Despite the previous findings on “snakes in suits”, Spurk found that the psychopaths in his sample actually performed worse on his measures of success

They are uniquely adapted to this job – because they can see underwater. And it turns out that with a little practice, their unique vision might be accessible to any young person.

Gislen figured that in order for the Moken children to see clearly underwater, they must have either picked up some adaption that fundamentally changed the way their eyes worked, or they had learned to use their eyes differently under water.

There are two ways in which you can theoretically improve your vision underwater. You can change the shape of the lens – which is called accommodation – or you can make the pupil smaller, thereby increasing the depth of field.

From scary sleep paralysis, to recalling memories that never happened, a new exhibition is exploring the art inspired by human consciousness. Here, we see how artists have interpreted moments from the mind.

The exhibition challenges our idea of being able to accurately remember moments from the past - and considers the relative ease of creating false memories.

But what the next image does do is bring to mind a patient's feeling of mistrust when they are under anaesthesia.

Christie's blessing came as a bolt from the blue, and taught us once more to expect the unexpected. But shouldn't the establishment - and us in the media, for that matter - have seen the billionaire coming? After all, for years the Republican standard bearers have been vulnerable to a challenge from an anti-establishment candidate.

The most obvious reason for the decline of the Republican establishment has been the rise of anti-establishment adversaries. The Tea Party, an insurgent grassroots movement that emerged after Barack Obama's inauguration, has posed the most serious threat.

However, most of us made the mistake of interpreting the results of the congressional mid-term elections as a major setback for insurgents, because they failed to make more breakthroughs.

Marco Rubio has won the latest contest in the battle to be the Republican presidential candidate, a day after being urged to quit the race.

While the win in Puerto Rico - a US territory - will boost Mr Rubio's campaign, it sends just 23 delegates to the Republican convention which nominates a presidential candidate. Republican hopefuls need the votes of 1,237 delegates to get the nod for the presidential race proper.

Meanwhile, Texas Senator Mr Cruz - who won Republican caucuses in Kansas and Maine - said he believed that "as long as the field remains divided, it gives Donald an advantage".

The FBI has a court order demanding Apple helps unlock an iPhone used by the gunman behind the San Bernardino terror attack, Syed Rizwan Farook.

Apple has argued that the move would jeopardise the trust it has with its customers and create a backdoor for government agencies to access customer data.

Apple has appealed against the court order, arguing that it should not be forced to weaken the security of its own products.

It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions.

Peer review seems to be a more fallible instrument—especially in areas such as medicine and psychology—than is often appreciated, as the emerging “crisis of replicability” attests.

Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really?

The first story about the typical Trump buyer was simple: These were poorly informed voters, swept up by a modern circus act orchestrated by a mass-media-age P. T. Barnum with arguably worse hair. But Trump’s appeal has proven to be more than a passing fad.

Back in December, a Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support skewed male, white, and poor.

The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.

Donald Trump’s run for the presidency is premised on one fact above all: He’s a fabulously successful businessman. And yet, paradoxically, running for president may be the most disastrous business decision he’s made—or, at the very least, his worst in a while.

It’s unclear what the value of Trump’s NBC, Macy’s, and Serta deals were, but it’s a safe bet that altogether they’re a bigger deal to Trump than they are to any one of those corporations

How did Trump get from $250 million, the upper end of O’Brien’s range, in 2005 to $9 billion today? It’s been 10 years, and an already-wealthy person can make a lot of money in 10 years, but that decade also included a massive economic slump, a crisis in real estate (putatively Trump’s core business), and a 2009 declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy by his casino group. One way to get to the $9 billion figure is that, as Jordan Weissmann highlighted, Trump estimates that the value of his name alone is worth more than a third of tha

Just before leading the rally in the pledge, Trump once again opened the door to ordering the torture of captured suspected terrorists, just one day after vowing that he would not order military officials to violate U.S. or international laws.

"We're going to stay within the laws. But you know what we're going to do? We're going to have those laws broadened because we're playing with two sets of rules: their rules and our rules," Trump said pointing to ISIS's tactics, which have included torture and brutal executions.

The comments mark a stark contrast to a statement Trump issued just a day earlier. After vigorously defending the use of waterboarding and suggesting that the U.S. should "go a lot further than waterboarding," Trump vowed Friday in a statement that he would "not order our military or other officials to violate those laws."

On Planet Cruz, there is a massive outpouring of public support for a government shutdown over Obamacare and it's scaring the hell out of Democrats.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the public hates the shutdown, Americans are 20 points more likely to blame Republicans for the shutdown than Obama, the Republican Party is scoring its worst poll numbers on record, Cruz's colleagues in the House and Senate hate him, and they're preparing to cave to the president by reopening the government and funding Obamacare.

When constituencies become aggrieved minorities, seeing themselves as under attack by the establishment, they are vulnerable to hucksters like Cruz, because they disregard outside warnings and evidence that they are being had.

Both candidates have whipped up voter passions by offering ideologically comforting — and strikingly similar — narratives promising political revolution. Both would fail to achieve such a momentous national transformation because popular opinion and the country’s system of checks and balances would get in the way.

This is partially because both candidates are telling bits of their parties’ bases what they want to hear. But another reason is that they have the “credibility” that comes from spending years angering “establishment” politicians — that is, people who have been sullied by having to govern in the real world of constraints and tradeoffs.

Cruz and his acolytes blame corruption or weakness for the failure of Republican leaders to make good on the conservative agenda — rather than the fact that those leaders had to govern a country that is not as conservative as they are and that faces challenges that lack pat solutions.

The world’s wealthiest 1 percent is likely to control over 50 percent of global wealth by next year, according to Monday’s report.

It used to be that the total wealth of the world’s billionaires and of the bottom half of the globe increased at roughly the same rate. That changed in 2010. Total wealth for the poorest 50 percent has actually decreased from what it was in 2009, while wealth at the top has doubled (in nominal terms). Just 80 billionaires now control the same wealth as 3.5 billion people.

Forbes listed 1,645 billionaires in 2014, one-third of whom started their lives wealthy. Ninety percent are male and 85 percent are over age 50. According to Oxfam, the top 80 billionaires have seen their collective wealth grow by $600 billion between 2010 and 2014.