Posts by Neil Petersen

Do letters have colors for you? Do numbers have locations in space? Do sounds have smells? If so, you might have synesthesia. And, as it turns out, you might also be more likely to have autistic traits. Synesthesia is a tendency to automatically associate information across different senses. Commonly, people with synesthesia associate letters, words,…

Not all college students use marijuana. But more than half do – at least, if a recent study done at University of Northern Colorado is representative of other schools. Granted, it is a college in Colorado. Still, the results tell us in general terms that, shockingly, weed is quite popular among college students. They also…

If you want to understand the differences between introverts and extraverts, one place you could look is their brains. Another, apparently, is their hearts. Recently, a study from researchers at Shaanxi Normal University in China and National University of Ireland found several differences in introverts’ and extraverts’ cardiovascular responses to stressful social situations. In the…

How many digits can you remember at once? Psychologists refer to this as a digit span test. For example, I might give you a number like 59368572 and ask you to repeat it back to me. Typically, people can hold about seven digits in their head at once, give or take a few. As it…

There are plenty of things we could be doing to improve students outcomes. Training teachers more thoroughly, giving schools more funding to work with, teaching students effective study strategies. But the impact of these interventions will be limited if students aren’t happy. The research that has been done indicates that students do best in school…

Who are you and what’s your life story? Answering one of these questions might tell you a lot about the other. People have a tendency to create stories out of things. Seeing our lives as having themes and narrative arcs is more appealing than the idea that our experiences are just strings of random events…

We can all probably agree that we’d like for the world to be a fair place. What’s harder to agree on is whether the world actually is fair. Although it’s a basic truth that “life isn’t fair,” people differ in the extent to which they believe the world is fair or unfair. Psychologists talk about…

You might have a certain picture of what a “millennial” looks like. Plugged into social media, snapping selfies, entitled, self-absorbed. In short, narcissistic. The narcissistic millennial is a trope that many journalists have taken and run with. For example, one New York Post columnist was so eager to pile on the millennial-bashing that he wrote…

Let’s talk about creativity, man. In 2012, residents of Washington state voted to make recreational marijuana illegal. This year, researchers from Washington State University published a study aiming to clarify the relationship between marijuana and creativity. Is there a connection there? I don’t know, dude. There are connections everywhere if you know how to look……