A new study shows that in the right circumstances, subliminal advertising can be made to work.

And continuing the theme of influences and abilities beyond our ken, you can read here about the ways in which human perception is better than we realize.

On a completely different note, parents of children who don't like reading as much as the parents think they should may be relieved to know that it's probably not the parents' fault -- it's those pesky genes again.

A study has shown what men probably knew all along and women kind of knew but couldn't really believe, and that is, that men really are so easily distracted by a pretty woman that their decision-making abilities are thrown for a loop after seeing one. The researchers have yet to find a visual stimulus that has the same effect on women. (Yes, one assumes that for homosexual men the stimulus would be a pretty man -- but there's an interesting question: do some homosexual men's brains act more like women's?). Interestingly, the more testosterone the man has, the stronger the effect.

And a fascinating new imaging study has caught the brain in the act of "losing oneself" in an activity -- an ability that most of us find so desirable, and one that seems to become harder to achieve as we get older (presumably this is related to the well-established finding that we become more distractible with age). Apparently, when the brain needs to divert all its resources to a difficult task, the region of the brain involved in introspection (the superfrontal gyrus) is inhibited.

A study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reports that groups of three, four, and five performed better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on the letters-to-numbers problems. The study involved 760 students who were asked to solve two letters-to-numbers coding problems, either as individuals or as groups of two, three, four and five people. Previous research has shown that groups perform better than the average individual on a wide range of problems. This study indicates that 2 is too few, but 3 is sufficient. The full text (it's not long) is available here in pdf format.

A recent report in Nature tells about an imaging study involving macaque monkeys that reveals a little more about how we make choices. The study looked into the inner workings of the orbitofrontal cortex, known to be involved in decision-making, and found a population of neurons that assign values to different goods on a common value scale. Actually the part I found particularly interesting was the reference to 'choice deficit' disorders -- in which category are such problems as eating disorders, compulsive gambling, & drug abuse. It's an intriguing idea that sufferers of such problems may have dysfunctional activity in these neurons, but that's what's being speculated.