Have some fun at Carl Zimmer's blog - try your hand at the famous Wason Selection Task. Then pop back to my site here and tell me how you did, and we'll see whether my readers are typical of the population! Really - the test is very quick, just two questions, and my quick poll is simply a matter of marking the appropriate button(s). And I'd really love to hear how you all do. Don't worry, it's completely anonymous.

The article also tells of a new imaging study looking at the brain activity of people doing a variant of this task, which aimed to show whether the brain works differently when it is solving problems in terms of "social exchange" than when the problem is more abstract.

To return to a hardy perennial (particularly in recent months), here's another article on sex differences in the brain. This one's in Scientific American. I particularly like the study with young vervet monkeys! I admit freely, as the mother of two sons, I believe utterly in innate gender differences, while believing just as firmly (and not in the least contradictorily) that this has no bearing on the educational and occupational opportunities that should be available to people. And do note that I went into motherhood a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist (raised on Watson and Skinner).

Here's something for those of us who want to justify our enjoyment of the much-maligned TV - Steven Johnson (author, most recently, of 'Mind Wide Open') has written an article in the New York Times about how TV, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, is really making us smarter! He has a point. Of course, it all comes down to what you watch.

And here's another one in similar vein - this time, a study that purports to demonstrate that emails are making us dumber!

I think the moral of both these cases is that it all depends on HOW you interact with ... whatever (tv, computers, phones, PDAs, etc etc).