Here's a couple of wonderful quotes from Darwin that came my way recently:

"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

"I had . . . during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones." -- that is SO true!

And Edge has an interview with Paul Bloom (who's done some fascinating work with young children regarding language), where he discusses how he thinks we are born dualists - believing instinctively in the separation of body and mind. A particular point he makes that I confess I had overlooked (having intellectually long since discarded dualism - although, as Bloom points out, we never really give up our subconscious belief in it) is that the amazing things coming out of neuroscience directly attack dualism, be demonstrating so clearly how so many attributes are products of our fleshy brains -- that the findings of imaging studies are an even greater revolution than Darwin's Origin of Species.

Science recently published a report of an intriguing brain imaging study - the study found a region of the brain associated with satisfaction was activated when players penalized cheaters in a game, suggesting we punish others because it's satisfying. There was moreover a correlation between a person's brain activity and how much punishment they choose to mete out despite the cost to themselves. However, a second area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, was activated when players needed to weigh the satisfaction derived from punishment against the monetary cost of punishing.
I note, without comment, that the participants in the experiment were all male!

And a study reported in Nature suggests that people with less symmetrical features are likely to be more aggressive in response to stressful situations.

And, just because I always have a soft spot for cognitive experiments with sheep, here's a report about a study that found that exposing isolated sheep to photos of other sheep lowers their stress levels. Researchers suggest the practice could be used to soothe solitary and sick animals and hope the work will help elucidate the brain mechanisms behind the ability to link faces with emotion.

This is a bit old, but someone recently directed my attention to it, and the truth of it is certainly not outdated! It's an article that appeared in Psychology Today, about common self-help myths. Reading it reminded me that that was why I wrote The Memory Key in the first place, and what my website is all about - providing factual information about memory improvement - because I was struck by how much the same tired half-truths were regurgitated over and over again in books and courses. Certainly there's more good resources out there than when I first started this, but of course, as always, you have to know where to look, who to trust, and how to sort the chaff from the wheat.