We all need to give ourselves mental breaks, but we also need to focus and not let email notifications, Twitter notifications, suck our attention.

We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle. 

We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle. 

Your brain learns to block out the noises that it hears all the time.

Maria Konnikova: the good news is that you can become more creative and I think that everyone has a certain degree of creativity in them.

Heavy multitaskers become worse at the very thing that they should be very good at. 

You can learn to argue with yourself. That’s actually how I get a lot of my thinking done. 

For whatever reason being in nature helps people become better at problem solving.

Experts should trust all of their instincts and their common sense in their areas of expertise. The problem comes when non-experts have "common sense opinion" that really is just coming out of nowhere. 

From an evolutionary perspective, our quickness to judge faces certainly makes sense. We need to know if someone is friend or foe, if he is strong or weak, if we can trust him or not. And we need to know quickly, before something bad happens. But is that quickness still as good when it determines national political outcomes?

It is remarkably easy to report false-positive findings, or results that support an effect that, in reality, does not (or may not) exist.

The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will.

In most circumstances, narcissism doesn’t go over well. But there’s one big exception to the rule: leadership.

Today, I don’t want to write about Kahneman’s work or his invaluable contribution to the study of decision making and the workings of the human mind, but rather, about something much more general: his approach to research.

When we habituate to something, our physical and psychological response becomes so used to it that whatever the “it” is stops being arousing. 

We become high achievers by working on something important—all the while procrastinating doing something even more important.

Being a chameleon is good only if your colors are changing in the right direction.

Can the mind influence the brain?

Touch has always played an important role in our development and in our tendency to make certain judgments and take certain risks.

Does a wandering mind make you less happy than a present mind? This question formed the basis of an important study by psychologists from Harvard University. The answer, I wasn’t surprised to find, is yes. Absolutely.

When researchers asked runners to repeat a specific phrase in their heads, like "push," the runners performed substantially better than they had prior to the intervention. 

Pay attention to what isn’t there, not just what is. Absence is just as important and just as telling as presence.

What it means to go beyond seeing and to actually observe.

The Asch effect has been replicated successfully numerous times, in a variety of contexts, and each time, peer pressure glows strong. 

A recent study shows that the decision to have children, and especially to have them early, is a factor that contributes to women's educational attainment. 

Self-control: we could all use more of it. Even those of us who are best at exercising self-control on a daily basis have so-called hot triggers, the special circumstances that would make us, too, lose our cool and start to behave less than rationally.

A change in scale forces us to take note. Objects that we would never notice acquire significance, become worthy of examination and attention. In other words, they force mindfulness.

While groups may have been wise at the start of the experiment, as soon as individuals within the group became aware of others’ estimates and choices, the diversity of opinions plummeted.

Choice is good. It’s always nice to have options. It makes us feel more in control; it supports our vision of ourselves as “deciders” in our own lives. But choice can also come with negative consequences.

I think it’s time to add the behavioral immune system to the long list of subconscious influences on our choices.

Actively pursuing happiness may not lead to an actual increase in happiness. In fact, it can do the opposite and make you less happy at the end of the day. 

Motivation matters. It matters a lot. It matters more than we thought, and might make more of a difference on both performance and life outcomes that we thought possible. 

Debate on personality disorders, classifications, diagnoses, and treatments is well worthwhile, and a colorful spokesperson never hurts.

Both too much and too little testosterone increase risk-taking and ambiguity tolerance.

Regarding optical illusions, framing, and choice.

Our decisions matter. You don’t need me to tell you that. Of course they matter. It almost seems a tautology, a restatement of the obvious, of the very definition of “decision.” And yet, even though we make decisions at every point in our lives . . .