It's called the Ganzfeld effect , and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale. The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that's the risk you take, dammit.
What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run -era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment. We never miss an opportunity to use this picture.
Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming. Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications.
While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose , we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:. Cowboy hat, optional. As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it.
Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream since most dreams are immediately forgotten and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.
Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.
Just us? The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning. So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer , a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!
Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions. Yes, Mel Gibson is dressed like Col. No, this is not a dream. In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain.
You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach. But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland.
If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you're ordering up a Smurf orgy. So say you haven't followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals.
A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter. No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep.
What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information say, for a big exam , do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it. Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed.
They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story. No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.
Wasting your time, nerds, go to sleep. Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation and recall.
While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middle-man that is important during sleep. When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't have processed with everything going on up there during the day.
This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. The best way to start it off is to just jump right in. Get to sleep at 8pm, set your alarm for Get up, play some Call of Duty , sleep again at 12, alarm at , and so on.
After three or four days of this you will start to get high as fuck because of sleep deprivation, and might just want to kill yourself, but don't do it! That would be absolutely counter-productive. By day 10 or so, your brain will say, "Fuck! FINE, we'll do it your way," and will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule.
When you sleep normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your brain sharp. While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested.
Of course, sleeping in a bed doesn't hurt either. The first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn't getting ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every time you lay down for one of these naps, dives directly into REM sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation.
Do some quick math and that's two full hours of REM sleep, while those who are sleeping normally are only getting an hour and a half. Before you know it, while the rest of the world snores away, you'll be up and drawing dicks on their faces. Yes, that's right kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.
Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after. It's called the Ganzfeld effect , and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale. The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain.
With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that's the risk you take, dammit.
What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run -era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment. We never miss an opportunity to use this picture. Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming. Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications.
While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose , we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:. Cowboy hat, optional. As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it.
Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream since most dreams are immediately forgotten and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.
Just us? The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning. So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer , a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!
Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions.
Yes, Mel Gibson is dressed like Col. No, this is not a dream. In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain.
You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach. But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland. No more sneaking naps at the fry station for you!
It's called the Uberman Sleep Schedule , and besides having a totally badass name, it's a way to get the maximum amount of essential sleep for your body without wasting hours of precious time you could be using to work or drink or farm for World of Warcraft gold.
The schedule consists of taking six to minute power naps every four hours during the day. Of course, this new sleep pattern blows donkey-dick to get used to, but it's a price you have to pay to basically extend your waking life by several years. We're pretty sure Kramer did this once on Seinfeld so it's probably a great idea. The best way to start it off is to jump right in. Get to sleep at 8 p.
Get up, play some Call of Duty , sleep again at 12, alarm at , and so on. After three or four days of this, you will start to get high as fuck because of sleep deprivation, and you might just want to kill yourself, but don't do it!
That would be absolutely counterproductive. By day 10 or so, your brain will say, "Fuck! FINE, we'll do it your way," and will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule. When you sleep normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your brain sharp.
While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested. Of course, sleeping in a bed doesn't hurt, either. The first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn't getting ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every time you lie down for one of these naps, it dives directly into REM sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation.
Do some quick math and that's two full hours of REM sleep, while those who sleep normally are only getting an hour and a half. Before you know it, while the rest of the world snores away, you'll be up and drawing dicks on their faces.
Sports drinks are a huge business -- Gatorade alone makes well over a billion dollars a year. And the reason so many athletes swear by them is the promise of increased performance, replacing all those vital nutrients lost during exercise, just like the ads say.
It turns out, however, that all that electrolyte and rehydration technology is nothing compared to the simple pleasure of having a bunch of sugar in your mouth. A study found that sports drinks work because they activate the pleasure center of your brain. You don't even have to drink them, just swishing some around in your mouth and spitting it out has the same effect.
However, motor oil will not "unlock the power" like the bottle says. The carbohydrates in the drink stimulate receptors in your mouth that then send your brain messages that things are all totally cool.
Your brain, in turn, becomes more active in the pleasure center, allowing you to enjoy feeling the burn far longer than some idiot without a sugary drink. It also stimulates the part of your brain in charge of movement control.
So not only will you be content while kicking your water-drinking opponent's ass, you'll actually be kicking it harder. Remember back in high school when you were talking to that cute girl you really liked, but you couldn't tell if she liked you back, and your fear of rejection prevented you from expressing your feelings in any way apart from night after night of tearful masturbation?
Remember when you did the same thing last week? Wouldn't asking someone out be so much easier if you knew how they'd answer before you asked them? Experts will tell you it's all in the body language, but you know better. People -- and especially women -- are really, really good at feigning disinterest.
Anything short of the woman outright grabbing your junk will be lost on most guys. Apparently, people aren't as conscious of their foot movements as they are of other parts of their body, and so their feet can unconsciously send messages about themselves. They did a study at the University of Manchester on this, observinging subjects' foot movements in various social situations.
The angle of her heels says "I put out," but those knees say "not for you. Specifically, they found that if a woman moves her feet apart to adopt a more open-legged stance, it generally means that she's into you. However, if she finds you utterly repulsive, she will likely cross her legs or keep them tucked underneath her body.
We'll, uh, let you figure out the symbolic meaning of those gestures. Yes, that's right, kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects. Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.
It's called the Ganzfeld effect , and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except on a larger scale.
The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that's the risk you take, dammit.
What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run -era Burt Reynolds.
Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment. We never miss an opportunity to use this picture. Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming. Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications.
While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose , we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:.
Cowboy hat optional. As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream since most dreams are immediately forgotten and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.
Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider. Just us? The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning.
So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer , a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having! Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions.
Yes, Mel Gibson is dressed like Colonel Sanders. No, this is not a dream. In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain.
You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach. But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland.
If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you're ordering up a Smurf orgy.
Chances are, when summer vacation or the holidays come around and you're given time off work or school, your sleeping patterns falter a little bit "a little bit" is a phrase that here means "you play video games until the 'a. The thing is, you know you're going to be screwed once the holidays are over and you have to go back to getting up at 6 or 7 a.
Sure, you could do the responsible thing and gradually set your alarm earlier and earlier each day until it's just right, giving you a smooth and healthy transition to work-life. Or, you could use one of your body's cheat codes and readjust your sleep cycle. Just starve yourself for about 16 hours. Don't forget to compensate for the hunger madness. You might know that the main way our body regulates its biological clock and circadian rhythm is through light.
So when your brain is detecting light, it has your body behave as it should in the daytime higher energy, greater strength, more bowel movements, etc. What you might not have known is that scientists recently found a second clock , and instead of depending on light, this one is food-based. The food-clock desires this. Imagine you're a predator out hunting for food and Jesse Ventura , but all the regular animals you would eat are nowhere to be found. You spend the entire day looking for food and find nothing.
About 16 hours later your brain starts freaking out. It knows that if you can't find food, the jig will most certainly be up. So at this point, your brain doesn't give a tinkerer's damn about sunlight and sleep cycles -- it just wants you to find something to eat, and fast. You stay up well into the night and eventually find some nocturnal prey, devouring it desperately. Your brain through the food-clock makes a note of this time and declares it to be your new biological morning. The slaying of pizza rolls has set countless new biological mornings.
It makes sense -- your brain is now under the impression that if you want to survive, you can only go hunting at night. So it decides you should sleep during the day to conserve energy for the hunt and boom, your sleep-wake cycle has been reset. You've tricked evolution! We previously pointed out that if you're right-handed, you instinctively prefer things that are on your right, and vice versa.
The theory is that, while we think with our brains, we use our hands to interact with the world , so the thinking part of your brain gets tricked into liking things that happen to be within reach of the hand you prefer to use. Elsewhere, we mentioned that you're more likely to remember facts if you associate them with a hand gesture , which is probably why some people are so animated with their hands when trying to recount a story. But how far does this weird hand-brain connection go?
Could, say, other people use hand gestures to manipulate you without you knowing it? Let's say you're an eyewitness to a bank heist. The cops come up to you and ask you to describe the guy. The officer says, "Did he have a beard? And in that moment you think, "Yeah I believe he did have a beard. The University of Hertfordshire did a series of tests where they interviewed participants about a video they had watched.
While asking questions, the researchers deliberately made misleading gestures, like stroking their chin to suggest a beard or touching their wrist to indicate a watch. The test subjects were three times more likely to believe that the guy in the video had a beard if the interviewer pretended to stroke his nonexistent goatee while asking about it.
These weren't mouth farts where you say "bearded" despite thinking "clean shaven," either. The gesture actually brainwashed the subjects into honestly believing that the guy had a beard.
And yes, when a politician or lawyer stands up and makes those hand gestures to drive home his point pointing at the audience, slapping his palm with his fist , that totally works. There are detailed guides on what exactly you should be doing with your hands if you want the audience to buy what you're selling. That's why a president can't simply say, "I've got your cruise missile right here " -- he needs to actually gesture toward his crotch to get the full effect.
We're not talking about the obvious here, the way goths and metalheads deal in black boots, hippies have their sandals, and hipsters will tie their grandmother's old curtains around their feet if it gives them an excuse to look down on someone. According to science, the soled husks that cover a stranger's feet are probably revealing details about how they deal with other people. We're calling it: date rapist. A study by a pair of colleges found some peculiar trends in our choice of shoes, but not what you might think.
Subjects couldn't deduce, say, political affiliation by looking at shoes, but could deduce a shit-ton of extremely personal information, including your potentially insecure, clingy behavior in close relationships.
Some examples, brought to you by science:. If you're reading this and thinking, "Well, my shoes don't say anything deep about my personality, I just picked them because they were comfortable and cheap!
That's the point -- no matter what logic you think you're following in your own head when you step into your local mall's Shoes 'N' Shit store, you're still following logic that makes sense to your personality type. Making that purchase reveals that type to the world. Say you're tired of sleeping like a mere mortal and want to learn how to turn those useless REM cycles into productivity cycles. A very minor change in your schedule can let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, thus making you smarter.
No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information say, for a big exam , do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it. Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed. They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize.
One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story. No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.
Wasting your time, nerds, go to sleep. How is it possible that your brain works like leveling up in Dungeons and Dragons? Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation, and recall.
While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middleman that is important during sleep. When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't have processed with everything going on up there during the day.
This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it like downloading something on a computer.
When you go to download something while your porn is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download. Yeah, kind of like that So does this technique work with the "sleep two hours a day" system we mentioned earlier? We're not sure anyone has tried it, but by our calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers, possibly including telekinesis.
Somebody in the comments try it and let us know. Getting drunk at work may have been the bee's knees in the Don Draper era, but that was a simpler time, before we knew how bad cigarettes, alcoholism, and recreational adultery were. We've learned a few things since the '60s.
Or we did for a while, and then we forgot them all when Mad Men debuted because they make it look so cool!
Here he is, doing the thing the article is about and looking like he's nervous about how clean his next fart is going to be. As much as we romanticize the behavior, there are all kinds of reasons drinking during the work day would be bad for you.
Foremost is the fact that you'll be drunk afterward. Ever tried to get anything done while you were drunk? And hey, you assholes who just said "I write all my college papers drunk!
It isn't. You're still a child; you can just drink now. But anyway, in some very specific situations, getting kinda drunk at work will help you out. There we go. It's all about finding a balance: Like I've pointed out, allowing your mind to wander a little bit improves creativity, because your thoughts explore new avenues and angles that you just can't achieve by focusing. It's the same way a light bulb lights up more areas than a flashlight, while the flashlight just makes one specific area brighter.
But sadly, it looks like the stiffs have won this fight: Job candidates who order alcoholic beverages during interviews are seen as less intelligent, even if the interviewer is in the process of getting sloshed , meaning that all human resources reps are dicks and that the people who write for the Journal of Consumer Psychology have way more fun job interviews than you.
There comes a time in every man's life when it will be necessary to drink another guy under the table. Maybe you're trying to win a bet, or prove your manliness, or maybe you're in a terrible rom-com and the only thing that stands between you and the woman you love is the varsity liquor drinking team that challenged you to a duel. We don't know We merely follow them to their inevitable, disastrous conclusion. So naturally you'll pick out some blond-haired, blue-eyed pretty boy who looks like two Bud Lights would have him over a toilet.
An hour later, you are praying for death. And to think this all could have been avoided if you had known how to pick out a lightweight drinker. Picking the blue-eyed guy was a bad move.
It turns out, eye color is an amazing indicator of how much alcohol a person can drink before it affects them. A study of thousands of white men all of them prisoners found that for some reason, those with light eye colors like blue, green, gray or hazel, can handle more alcohol than men with dark eyes.
And a totally different study of almost 2, women found that the same held true for them. We're not alcoholics. We just both have green eyes. Even more interesting is the fact that this result was predicted before the study.
Because apparently brown-eyed folks are more sensitive to medication and other stimuli, and that sensitivity is what prompts them to stop when they've had enough. Blue-eyed people, on the other hand, require more alcohol to get buzzed, so they develop a greater tolerance for the stuff. And according to the study, the blue-eyed people are also more likely to be alcohol abusers. As for what eye color has to do with alcohol tolerance, scientists are still on the fence.
One theory is that the amount of melanin in the eyes is directly related to the amount of melanin insulating neurons in the central nervous system, and that more melanin somehow translates to quicker nerve transmissions.
In any case, you might want to think again before challenging someone with baby blues to a drinking contest. You were wearing brown contacts the whole time? One of the reasons it's difficult to lie to someone's face is that it's not just the words you're saying that have to sound convincing. You have to think about eye contact, body movements -- everything has to come together to tell a believable lie.
Because of this, psychologists have always known that people are more likely to lie in a letter than face-to-face. But a recent study found that while you might fib with pen and paper you are almost guaranteed to lie over email. They were told the other participant would not know the amount being split, and had to accept any amount offered. An incredible 92 percent of people using email lied about the amount of money they were splitting. Only 64 percent of those writing it down did although, 64 percent?
We're just bad at being a species, aren't we? Not only that, the email users actually felt justified in lying. It seems that the act of merely staring at a computer screen is like injecting your soul with Botox, removing all emotional investment and guilt about what you type. It might be worth keeping that in mind the next time your boss emails you to tell you how well he thought your presentation went.
Constant, manic paranoia is all that can save your career. Of course, all of our male readers are already virtual experts on the subject of female sexuality. But for the rare, sheltered fan who isn't, we need to explain something about the female orgasm. When it comes to climaxing, ladies can do it two ways: from the inside or from the outside.
The inside orgasm comes from the G-spot and is super easy to achieve if her partner's penis is shaped like a letter "J. Some women require more If for some reason you are curious to know whether, say, the lady who delivers your mail has regular vaginal orgasms, there's an easy way to tell.
Rascal-bound women remain as damnably incomprehensible as ever. A group of sexologists which is apparently a thing from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium studied the connection between the way a woman walks and her vaginal orgasm history.
What else did you think sexologists studied? They gathered a group of women -- half had never had vaginal orgasms, half had. And then, we shit you not, the scientists had to guess which group each lady fell into by the way she sashayed her stuff across the room. Stodgson, but I suddenly feel like this might be the most important study we've ever conducted.
And here was the kicker: It worked. The sexologists could determine whether or not the woman in question could have a vaginal orgasm with freaking Now, we caution you against trying this if you're not a trained sexologist yourself -- we're not responsible for any injuries or incorrect conclusions drawn.
But the experts say women who were climaxing from the inside had longer stride lengths, greater pelvic rotation and an "absence of both flaccid and locked muscles. A loose but confident walk. Now you know, and you'll never, never un-know. This is the guy who stumbles into the office sometime in the afternoon with a three-day beard and hangover shades. The dude who never comes in close to on time and just assumes that everyone else will adjust to compensate. But hey, it turns out that guy is actually a better worker.
Everybody has different body clocks. Not only does your natural wake-up time get earlier as you grow older, but that rate is different for everyone -- so keeping everyone on the same schedule makes about as much sense as insisting that they're all named "Sven" to save money on name tags.
It's actually just basic common sense: If you let people work when their body is ready for them to work instead of when their brain is screaming at them to get some sleep, they'll work more efficiently and be in better moods. Scientists have found that most people do their best thinking in the late morning, and asking adults to focus between noon 4 p.
People start to get tired after lunch, and if they don't take time for a siesta, their productivity plummets. A study found that students who were asked to solve problems requiring novel thinking during non-peak hours of the day performed worse on those tasks.
Since everyone hits those peak hours at slightly different times, people work best when they can function according to their natural clocks. We've already covered how wearing red makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, but now it looks like we might as well throw away any non-rose toned clothing because it turns out it makes you more likely to win at sports too.
This man will humiliate you on the field and then take your girlfriend. Two British researchers studied the results of the Olympics and found that the team or person wearing red was more likely to win in close matches -- and that's across a huge variety of team and individual sports, like soccer, tae kwon do, and wresting. The key, though, is close matches; if you were ranked 23rd and had to wrestle the 1 guy in the world, no amount of red would save you.
No one's buying it, Cleveland. But in an even match-up, wearing red is a statistically significant factor in winning. The researchers think the reason for this might not be all that different from why red attracts us to people: Red equals dominance.
We see it in species of monkeys, too, where the males have red colorations in their face and butts. The more dominant males tend to be much redder then the ones lower down the hierarchy. In humans, our faces turn red when we are all riled up, angry or ready for a fight. The association of red uniforms with dominance and aggression may send subconscious signals to an opponent that they are being really stupid and challenging the alpha male.
Imagine a likeable person. Pay particular attention to the qualities that make people perceive her as "nice. Fun, definitely. Honest when it counts, malleable enough to take the punches while you run away from the MMA fighter you just drunkenly mooned.
All that goes with the territory. Perhaps, if you're feeling sappy enough, you might even describe the person as "sweet. That's a funny word in this context, now that we come to think of it. There's nothing about nice people that makes them sweet, unless you go out of your way to caramelize them. So what started this association between "sweet" and "nice"?
Their everyday behavior, apparently -- it looks like munching on candy can turn a person into a regular good Samaritan. I'll pack his chest wound with gauze, if you insist. To be clear, we're not talking about how giving somebody a candy bar will put them in a better mood and thus make them more willing to do nice things although one experiment did find that, it's also kind of obvious.
No, they actually did five different studies the abstract of which hilariously points out that nice people indeed rarely taste sweeter than others, thus gently alluding to another, far darker research project behind this one and found that a general preference for candy means the person is also more likely to be agreeable and do good deeds, just because. They were just nicer people than the ones who, say, prefer potato chips instead of chocolate at snack time.
And it gets weirder: Test subjects already knew that this would be the result. The subjects they surveyed anticipated that the candy-loving subjects would be more selfless and agreeable than people who liked savory or salty snacks.
The experiment was just confirming what people had already observed in their everyday lives, even though it makes no sense. So maybe the innate goodness that lies in the heart of mankind is actually diabetes.
Really persuasive people know that it's all about touch: the salesman or politician is quick to pat you on the back or shake your hand; the waitress knows that a touch on your arm gets a bigger tip. If the thing they're selling is a physical product, they know they'd better let us customers put our greasy mitts on it. This is why car salespeople are so big on making you test drive the vehicle they literally phrase the technique as " The feel of the wheel will seal the deal ".
Because in humans, touch is almost a form of goddamn mind control. Whatever it is, if you touch it for a while, you'll become attached to it. Not only are people more likely to buy something they've touched, but they're actually willing to pay more -- this is why, if the product comes in a box, the store will try to put a display model out that you can handle to your heart's content.
Even if you can't actually gain any information about the usefulness of the product, it doesn't matter. Running your paws over an object makes you feel connected to it, and can even give you a false sense of ownership. This is exactly how Hitler started out. Oh, and it also makes a difference how the object feels under our hands.
We don't just mean that we judge a new shirt based on how soft it is -- that sort of makes sense. We mean that one study showed that water in a firm cup tasted better than water in a flimsy cup, regardless of the fact that it was the same water. Even when people were just told about the firmer cup, they declared its water superior -- just because the container felt better under their hands. Hey, do you think this is why super-expensive Fiji water comes in thicker bottles that contain twice as much plastic?
Or why Perrier still uses freaking glass? If you want to know what the future of touch-based brainwashing is, well, it involves products that enjoy making you touch them.
Sony tried this with their QRIO robot -- a vaguely canine mecha-creature that recognizes faces and responds to touch -- by letting it loose among a bunch of 2-year-olds. Usually, toddlers treat robots like regular toys, tossing them around and using them as blunt weapons before quickly getting bored with them.
But QRIO is different -- it senses touch and gives little giggles of pleasure. When it started doing that, the kids accepted it as a living being.
Instead of throwing it around, the kids gently touched it, just like it was another child , and even put a blanket over it when it "laid down for a nap. We'll just let you make your own child molestation joke here. At some point you've probably seen that spinning ballerina GIF floating around online, the one that supposedly tells you whether you're "left-brained" or "right-brained.
In reality, both hemispheres work together for pretty much everything. It takes a full brain to make us as gullible as we are. However, it is true that your two hemispheres aren't identical. In the case of sound, it's long been known that your left hemisphere kicks ass at deciphering verbal information like speech, and the right hemisphere excels with tones and music. It is also known that your left brain controls the right side of your body and vice versa.
But because the information between the hemispheres is shared through the corpus callosum -- yea, Latin , it shouldn't make much difference which ear you use to listen to things, right? Each ear hears in a different way, and you can use that to your advantage. It turns out that because the left ear is always sending shit music to the right hemisphere and the right ear is always sending shit speech to the left hemisphere, the ears themselves have actually evolved in the way they process sounds.
Which means you're paying 50 percent too much for headphones. As a result, your right ear is measurably better at processing speech, and your left ear more so at tones and music. Now, don't go expecting that turning your head to give the appropriate ear will produce a surround sound digitally remastered version of what you've normally been hearing, but there will be an improvement. This is important to remember the next time you're sneaking through the air vents of an evil corporation, or just trying to figure out whether that is in fact a Peter Gabriel song you're hearing in the supermarket.
If you want music to help you but refuse to stop smoking pot, perhaps you can at least remember where you put your car keys. Or, more applicably, if you have Alzheimer's , it could help you remember pieces of your past. Medical practitioners have found that music shows the potential to unearth memories associated with music for patients, even ones in late stages of dementia. So if you had your first kiss to the dulcet tones of Jefferson Starship, their terrible, terrible music could bring that memory right back for you.
Listening to music engages many areas of the brain in both hemispheres, which is why it can create brain activity other methods, like conversation, can't. Another area it engages is the hippocampus, which would be a hilarious name for a school for aquatic mammals but in reality is the less impressive region of the brain which handles long-term memory storage.
When you listen to music you know, feelings associated with the song are returned by the hippocampus. Sometimes the memories even manage to come along with the relevant feelings, so hopefully no music was playing the first time anyone ever kicked you in the junk.
Even if memories aren't recovered, emotions and attitudes are, allowing people who can't even remember who they are from day to day or why they loathe the FOX network so much to at least laugh and sing along with off key hopefuls on American Idol. Maybe you're one of those hippy types who couldn't care less about the socioeconomic status of everyone around you.
We're really happy for you if that's the case. But for most of us, knowing where we stand among our peers actually helps us avoid embarrassing gaffes or rage-inducing insults.
0コメント