If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.

Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.

By suggesting tracks based on my activities and parts of the day, I found the service exposed me to music out of my comfort zone.

Programmers for radio stations also look at these services to decide what to add to their rotations.

“These were all songs that were different from what radio was playing, and radio tends to be a homogeneous medium,” Mr. Molanphy said.

Can economists judge this to be a good thing? Indeed, how useful is efficiency as a normative guide to public policy? Can economists legitimately base their advocacy of particular policies on that criterion?

But when greater efficiency is accompanied by a redistribution of economic privilege in society, subjective ethical dimensions inevitably get baked into the economist’s recommendations.

so we regard that opportunity to win $100 not as a chance for gain but as an outsize opportunity to fail.

He and his colleagues hope that experiments already underway will produce more and clearer explanations.

Still, most teenagers said they read the first few sites that popped up in an online search, rather than delving further. The information often did not directly address their concerns or was densely written, they said.

When asked where they got “a lot” of health information, 55 percent of the teenagers cited their parents. School health classes and medical providers also ranked higher than the Internet as preferred sources.

teenagers do not search online the way adults do, which contributes to the uneven quality of the information they receive.

“We should be able to provide kids with better, independent online health resources.”

“The strengthening of engram synapses is crucial for the brain’s ability to access or retrieve those specific memories,” Ryan said.

“past memories may not be erased, but could simply be lost and inaccessible for recall”.

If the emotional content of facial expressions were in fact universal, the Himba subjects would have sorted the photographs into six piles by expression, but they did not.

These findings strongly suggest that emotions are not universally recognized in facial expressions, challenging the theory, attributed to Charles Darwin, that facial movements might be evolved behaviors for expressing emotion.

The answer is that we don’t passively recognize emotions but actively perceive them, drawing heavily (if unwittingly) on a wide variety of contextual clues — a body position, a hand gesture, a vocalization, the social setting and so on.

Madison's high school friends had told her they were also struggling. Emma Sullivan was running track at Boston College and having a hard time. Another friend, Jackie Reyneke, was playing basketball at Princeton and feeling overwhelmed. They had all shared some form of their struggles with Madison, yet in her mind, the lives her friends were projecting on social media trumped the reality they were privately sharing.

Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies.

“It’s so powerful when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail,” Loftus said. “Especially when they express emotion. To just say, ‘Oh my god it must be true.’ But all those characteristics are also true of false memories, particularly the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional. So you need independent corroboration.”

When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory.

been able to successfully convince ordinary people that they were lost in a mall in their childhood, pointed out that false memory recollections also occur among high profile people.

All memory, as McGaugh explained, is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, “they are reconstructing,” he said. “It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true.”

“puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”

For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.

“Why did evolution do that?” McGaugh said. “Because it was essential for our survival.

We now know animals are likely susceptible to memory distortions too, as MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice.

“We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”

“but you as the writer have the obligation to get as close to the truth as you possibly can,” Meyer said

The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”

Emotion regulation means being able to think constructively about how to cope with feelings. We want children to have their feelings, but not be overwhelmed by them

When a child expects that her feelings and concerns will be appreciated and understood, her emotions become less urgent

. Later, those who produced the most oxytocin were the most likely to give money to others they couldn't see.

"Our results show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials," Zak said. "This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales."

A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrated that consumers who experienced fear while watching a film felt a greater affiliation with a present brand than those who watched films evoking other emotions, like happiness, sadness or excitement.

The rude comments made participants dig in on their stance

That emotions are critical -- maybe even more than previously thought -- to marketing.

In an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 percent versus 16 percent) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).

The emotional brain processes sensory information in one fifth of the time our cognitive brain takes to assimilate the same input

we're not just sharing the object, but we're sharing in the emotional response it creates."

Then, fMRI data from 700 participants suggested that womens' stronger reactivity to negative emotional images is linked with increased activity of motor regions of the brain.

The findings may help scientists to come to a better understanding of gender differences in neuropsychiatric conditions, which may pave the way for improved treatment options.

"Women are more likely to develop major depression, anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are related to emotional dysregulation," Milnik said. "We hope that understanding the neural correlates of sex-specific emotional processing will be an important step towards elucidating the mechanisms linked to sex-dependent emotional dysregulation."

That’s why we think of scent as a trigger for personal memory — leading to the recall of something specific, particular, uniquely our own.

When the research team visited the Jahai, rain-forest foragers on the Malay Peninsula, they found that the Jahai were succinct and more accurate with the scratch-and-sniff cards.

The team also found that several communities — speakers of Persian, Turkish and Zapotec — used different metaphors than English and Dutch speakers to describe pitch, or frequency: Sounds were thin or thick rather than high or low. In later work, they demonstrated that the metaphors were powerful enough to disrupt perception.

younger Cantonese speakers had fewer words for tastes and smells than older ones, a shift attributed to rapid socioeconomic development and Western-style schooling.

Pattern recognition only serves as an edge when you know how to use it to your advantage.

A kaleidoscope of perspectives also adds luster to life, which sometimes gets dulled by the force of our own habits.

new research has found that taking photos -- an increasingly ubiquitous practice in our smartphone-obsessed culture -- actually hinders our ability to remember that which we're capturing on camera.

most of us aren't able to effectively manage the overload of information we're constantly bombarded with.When the working memory is experiencing digital overload, it's like a glass of water overflowing.

when we know a digital device or tool will remember a piece of information for us, we're less likely to remember it ourselves.

He explained that an over-reliance on technology has a tendency to encourage us to isolate pieces of information without fitting them into a broader cognitive schema.

A 2013 Trending Machine national poll found that millennials (aged 18-34) are more likely than those over the age of 55 to forget what day it is (15 percent vs. 7 percent) and where they put their keys (14 percent vs. 8 percent).

While the findings aren’t enough to conclude that media multitasking causes brain shrinkage

Psychologist and author Guy Winch, Ph.D., argues that a more accurate term for multitasking would be “task switching,” because you’re going to and from one action to another instead of truly doing two things at once, which wastes energy on transitions and slows you down.

researchers have identified the primary threat to linguistic diversity: economic development.

More research is necessary to determine precisely what it is about economic development that kills languages, he adds. Figuring out how growth interacts with other factors such as landscape is the next step, he says.

Economics is far from the whole story, however, she says.

Generations of disease, murder, and genocide—both historic and present, in some regions—have also played an important role and were not included in the new study's analysis, she says.

"Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," Limb said in a statement. "But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language."

In the attention schema theory, attention is the physical phenomenon and awareness is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it.