Word: sleeps
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...have ever struggled with a difficult decision - new job vs. new boyfriend, sports car vs. minivan, read the book vs. see the movie - you have likely also been offered a heap of decision-making wisdom. Make a list of pros and cons. Go with your gut. Sleep...
...this last bit of advice - sleep on it - espoused in a paper by Dutch researchers and published in the journal Science in 2006, that really irked Ben Newell, a researcher himself at the University of New South Wales in Australia. That paper suggested that people might be better off relying on unconscious deliberation to make complex decisions - despite an abundance of scientific evidence to the contrary - given that the human brain can reasonably only focus on a few things at a time. Once people have all the necessary information to make a decision, the paper found, too much conscious deliberation...
Newell's answer to the Science paper is called "Think, Blink or Sleep on It? The Impact of Modes of Thought on Complex Decision Making," co-authored with colleagues at the University of New South Wales and the University of Essex in England, and published in the most recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It took four experiments to make the point, but Newell's conclusion is that unconscious deliberation is no more effective than conscious deliberation - using lists of pros vs. cons, for example - for making complex decisions, and that if anything, people who deliberate methodically...
...told, says Newell. When they try to recall the information, the thing they remember best is the last positive information they heard - a phenomenon that researchers call the "recency effect" (and one that advertisers have found very useful). Newell thinks a similar factor may have been what influenced the "sleep on it" results in the Dutch study, but because he doesn't know what order the Dutch subjects were given their information, he can't say for certain. "Both cars in the experiment were equal, so I would expect roughly equal numbers of the subjects to chose each car," says...
...were a vampire, what would your special power be? -Melanie Konstantinou TRENTON, N.J.I have a hard time imagining that I would have one. I think I would just be happy with not having to sleep and not aging. That would be kind of cool...