Do you have difficulty making decisions? Do you make decisions that you later regret or lead to worsening life situations?

The ability to make good decisions may be more important than intelligence in producing better life outcomes according to a study being done by Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp.

The results of the study imply that teaching people decision-making skills could improve their quality of life.

“Intelligence doesn’t explain everything. Our results suggest that people with good decision-making skills obtain better real-life outcomes, even after controlling for cognitive ability, socio-economic status and other factors,” said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a researcher in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon and the lead author of the study. “That is good news, because decision-making skills may be taught.”

Carnegie Mellon has a short version of the test online that you can take yourself to see how you score in comparison with other participants. The test takes about 15 minutes and is confidential but you do need to leave an email address for them to mail the test results back to you.

Read the article Good Decision-Makers May Be Made,
Not Born, Says Carnegie Mellon Study and take the test.

Research published by Grand Valley State University reports the conclusion that when it comes to brains, bigger is better.

Larger animals generally tend to have larger brains but part of the reason was assumed to be the need to control their larger bodies. But researchers found one other reason: larger animals also tend to be smarter.

The difference lies in cognitive ability related to environment. Domain-general cognitive ability allows species to adapt and deal with changes in the environment, whereas domain-specific skills are suited only to particular environments.

Larger animals may need to be smarter to control aspects of their environment, and because they generally live longer, they may have more to gain from being flexible and adaptable as the environment is more likely to change during their lifetimes.

Although the researchers concluded that it is not always necessary to adjust for the correlation between body size and brain size in comparing intelligence across species, they do allow that body size cannot always be dismissed as a factor - larger bodies may need larger brains to accomodate greater neural traffic. And although they do not assert that elephants or whales are smarter than humans or that men are more intelligent that women, in general, brain size seems to be linked with intelligence.

Bigger is Smarter!

Science fiction has long used the imagined futuristic ability to create and erase memory to build a plot. Total Recall, Paycheck, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are just a few movies using such a plot device. But new research at Brandeis University indicates that memory erasure may not be so far-fetched or impossible.

By manipulating a protein kinase called CaMKII, researchers say that memory storage can be induced and erased from the hippocampus. CaMKII has been termed a “memory molecule”. When CaMKII is chemically attacked, memory is erased.

Researchers cite the possible use of this discovery in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy but one has to wonder about the ethical uses of this ability to weaken synapses by attacking memory molecules, the ability to prevent or erase memory storage.

Read more: New Research Sheds Light On Memory By Erasing It

The BBC has an Internet survey on Brain Sex and if you’ve never taken it, you should go there and try it out. I remember doing this survey a year or so ago and I wasn’t surprised by the results so for me, anyway, it seemed accurate.

The data from the survey has been analyzed and research papers with key findings are being published in the current issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. You can read the BBC summaries of the articles at bbc.co.uk.

The survey had over 450,000 participants and 225,000 completed the survey. Some of the conclusions may be considered common knowledge, such as the finding that men rank good looks in a mate higher than women do. But some findings are intriguing. The survey results link spatial processing ability to sexual orientation.

You can take the Sex ID test here. Get a brain sex profile and find out if your brain is more male or more female. Have a ruler handy, because you will need to measure your fingers (really). It’s a revealing test that may help you understand why you think like you do.