science

Humans who feel a lack of control look for patterns more actively than people who feel in control. A lack of control can make you see patterns where none exist. Illusions are the result. That's what the scientists show: Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception. This article appears in the latest issue of Science, and enjoys coverage, like here on NPR, or in the BBC news.

I couldn't think of a more unwelcome time to highlight human shortcomings with regard to rational thinking.

Dig this, the frame effect is mediated by amygdala activation.

Here is a passage I picked up during a quick-stop over at Creative Generalist. It is taken from an interview in October's Harvard Business Review with Stanford management guru James G. March:

Part of foolishness, or what looks like foolishness, is stealing ideas from a different domain. Someone in economics, for example, may borrow ideas from evolutionary biology, imagining that the ideas might be relevant to evolutionary economics. A scholar who does so will often get the ideas wrong; he may twist and strain them in applying them to his own discipline. But this kind of cross-disciplinary stealing can be very rich and productive. It's a tricky thing, because foolishness is usually that--foolishness. It can push you to be very creative, but uselessly creative. The chance that someone who knows no physics will be usefully creative in physics must be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it. Yet big jumps are likely to come in the form of foolishness that, against long odds, turns out to be valuable. So there's a nice tension between how much foolishness is good for knowledge and how much knowledge is good for foolishness.