Quoted: rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,”

Quoted: Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

And, oh yeah, try meditation

Quoted: When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

Quoted: She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. “Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.”

Quoted: InnoCentive is an open innovation community of smart, creative people who provide solutions to tough problems in business, science, product development, math, and computer science. Companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations post challenges on our Open Innovation Marketplace and offer cash awards for the best solution.

Quoted: Piqqem is an exciting new way to get information about stocks and see what everyone else is thinking. The biggest investors move the market based on their opinion of stock. But how can you find what everybody else is thinking? Piqqem tells you the opinion of the crowd.

The phrase 'wisdom of crowds' brings to mind images of Nazi rallies and lynch-mobs... apparenhtly they were'nt 'wise crowds'.

Quoted: The largest investing wiki with research on hundreds of companies, investment concepts, and more.

To check out later...

Quoted: Surveying outcomes for 160,000 Ph.D. recipients across the United States, the researchers determined that 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children, compared with only 44 percent of their tenured female colleagues. Twelve years or more after receiving their doctorates, tenured women were more than twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced. And lest all of this look like “personal choice,” when the researchers asked 8,700 faculty members in the University of California system about family and work issues...

(Well, maybe not if the stranger is a nice Korean lady handing out Chick-tracts promising you eternity in hell ;-) )

Quoted: “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

with a video

Quoted: The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them.