Hot MedFax

You got back to your car just in time to dodge the parking ticket.  You were the 100th customer at the supermarket and qualified for free groceries.  And your son just got into the college of his choice, all in one day. On a winning streak ?  Not likely, say experts.  Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are, well, random, according to newswise.com. We're not alone.  Monkeys do it, too.  Researchers find that monkeys also share our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks. "The results suggests that the penchant to see patterns that actually don’t exist may be inherited—an evolutionary adaptation that may have provided our ancestors a selective advantage when foraging for food in the wild, according to lead author Tommy Blanchard, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester," newswise reports.  This inborn tendency to feel that w...

Have you ever wanted to kill (oops, contain) someone yakking on their cellphone next to you on the bus?  Had to read the same paragraph over 12 times to get its meaning?  Been unable to work on an assignment your boss needed yesterday? A new study has found why.   It's because our brains feel the need to fill in the blanks when we only hear one side of a conversation. According to Douglas Quenqua, "College students who were asked to complete anagrams while a nearby researcher talked on her cellphone were more irritated and distracted — and far more likely to remember the contents of the conversation — than students who worked on the same puzzles while the same conversation was conducted by two people in the room." As Tyger Latham reports, "According to Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman, authors of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us , the reason cell phone conversations are so grating to most of us is because they are in fact "half conversations," in whi...