Boredom has, paradoxically, become quite interesting to academics lately. The International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference gathered humanities scholars in Warsaw for the fifth time in April. In early May, its less scholarly forerunner, London’s Boring Conference, celebrated seven years of delighting in tedium. At this event, people flock to talks about toast, double yellow lines, sneezing, and vending-machine sounds, among other snooze-inducing topics.

One reason that personality is such an important psychological concept is because of what it tells us about the kind of lives we’re likely to lead. For example, if you are very conscientious then you’re more likely to enjoy good physical health and more harmonious relationships; extroverts are happier; highly neurotic people experience more mental health problems; open-minded people command higher earnings; and, just as you’d expect, more ‘agreeable’ people are also usually popular and have lots of friends.

Suffering a brain injury can make people more religious, scientists have found. Researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, found patients who had a brain trauma were less willing to accept new ideas and became more extreme in their religious beliefs. The study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, found that lesions in a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were linked to higher levels of religious fundamentalism.

We're fickle creatures. At least if we can remember to be, according to a new study led by a University of Kansas researcher of marketing and consumer behavior. "People with larger working memory capacities actually encode information more deeply," said Noelle Nelson, lead author of the work, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. "They remember more details about the things they've experienced, and that leads them to feel like they've had it more. That feeling then leads to the 'large-capacity' people getting tired of experiences faster."

When mulling over possible reasons for the alarming nastiness associated with the recent presidential election in the United States, I am reminded of my grade-school bully. Handsome, often charming, superbly athletic, the bully (let’s call him Mike) would frequently, usually without clear provocation, kick, punch and shove other classmates. Fortunately, for reasons not apparent at that time, he never bothered me.

Last night for the third time in as many months I found myself explaining to someone raised outside of a devoutly religious environment that religious people are not stupid simply because they believe nonsensical things. Each of the three times I’ve had this conversation it’s been with a different person whose professional life has increasingly come to focus on critiquing religion. Each time I’ve encountered the same bewilderment, and each time I’ve covered the same ground in an attempt to explain how and why some people who are very intelligent can...

It sounds like a child’s dream come true: starting school later may be more beneficial for kids than forcing them to embrace the early morning grind. According to a study published in the journal Sleep Medicine, delaying school start time by just 15 minutes could do wonders for adolescent mental health—and it all has to do with preventing sleep deprivation.

Books fly from the shelf as Superman fans the pages in a blur devouring the information at blinding speed. Superhuman mental powers, including his extraordinary sense of hearing and blazing speed-reading, are as vital to Superman as his bullet-beating velocity and steel-bending strength. But it seems Superman isn't the only being with the gift of quickness.

You saw the pictures in science class—a profile view of the human brain, sectioned by function. The piece at the very front, right behind where a forehead would be if the brain were actually in someone’s head, is the pre-frontal cortex. It handles problem-solving, goal-setting, and task execution. And it works with the limbic system, which is connected and sits closer to the center of the brain. The limbic system processes emotions and triggers emotional responses, in part because of its storage of long-term memory.

Look at a photo of yourself as a teenager and, mistaken fashion choices aside, it’s likely you see traces of the same person with the same personality quirks as you are today. But whether or not you truly are the same person over a lifetime—and what that notion of personhood even means—is the subject of ongoing philosophical and psychology debate. The longest personality study of all time, published in Psychology and Aging and recently highlighted by the British Psychological Society, suggests that over the course of a lifetime...

The emotional and physical effects right after a breakup are different for men and women, but so is their recovery, according to a recent study. Researchers from Binghamton University and University College London asked 5,705 participants in 96 countries to dig deep into those emotional memories and recall their last breakup. The researchers then asked the participants to rate their emotional and physical pain following that breakup on a scale of one (none) to 10 (horrible).

YOU ONLY USE 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high. None of those things are true. But the facts don’t actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias—which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

Study debunks long-held myth probably arising from the confirmation bias. The full moon is NOT linked to busier hospital emergency rooms or more births, a new study finds. The belief that there might be a link is likely down to a bias in the way even intelligent people think called the confirmation bias. Jean-Luc Margot, a UCLA professor of planetary astronomy, who carried out the study...

If I asked how you train your mind, what would you say? “I read a lot.” “I meditate for an hour every day.” “I journal every night.” If any of those things are true, then you’re doing a great job of feeding your mind. But what happens when you feed yourself and don’t workout? You get flabby. People who hit the gym regularly have bodies that show it. The same is true for people who condition their minds. Conditioning isn’t about feeding your brain new information or finding productivity “hacks,” it’s about creating a training routine for your mind.

Emotional experiences can induce physiological and internal brain states that persist for long periods of time after the emotional events have ended, a team of New York University scientists has found. This study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, also shows that this emotional "hangover" influences how we attend to and remember future experiences.

It’s there, at the start of every conversation: the moment it takes your brain to adjust to an unfamiliar voice. It only lasts for a second or two, but in that brief time, your brain is thumbing its radio dial, tuning in to the unique pitch, rhythm, accent, and vowel sounds of a new voice. Once it is dialed in, the conversation can take off. This process is called rapid neural adaptation, and it happens constantly. New voices, sounds, sights, feelings, tastes, and smells all trigger this brain response. It is so effortless that we are rarely even aware it’s happening.

Good mental health and having a partner make people happier than doubling their income, a new study has found. The research by the London School of Economics looked at responses from 200,000 people on how different factors impacted their wellbeing. Suffering from depression or anxiety hit individuals hardest, whilst being in a relationship saw the biggest increase in their happiness. The study's co-author said the findings demanded "a new role from the state".

Language is the hallmark of humanity—it allows us to form deep relationships and complex societies. But we also use it when we’re all alone; it shapes even our silent relationships with ourselves. In his book, The Voices Within, Charles Fernyhough gives a historical overview of “inner speech”—the more scientific term for “talking to yourself in your head.” Fernyhough, a professor at Durham University in the U.K., says that inner speech develops alongside social speech. This idea was pioneered by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who studied children in the 1920s and noted that...

THINK back to your first childhood crush. Maybe it was a classmate or a friend next door. Most likely, through school and into adulthood, your affections continued to focus on others in your approximate age group. But imagine if they did not. By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse.

A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child, but then stop, because they realise that the crumbling old well could collapse under their weight. Their initial impulse to save the child competes with their desire for self-preservation.