According to ted.com: “Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich.
“In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin would effect reactions when a person felt that they were treated unfairly. They manipulated serotonin in a study by giving participants a beverage designed to deplete the brain of the amino acid tryptophan, which gets converted into serotonin. The study found that, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to seek revenge when they felt mistreated.
“That’s the study we did. And here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards,” says Crockett, revealing these doozies:
- “A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision making,” The Hindustan Times (June 6, 2008)
- “Eating cheese and meat may boost self-control,” Discover Magazine (June 6, 2008)
- “Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy,” The West Australian (June 10, 2008)”
An interesting talk on how we mis-use science to sell products.
For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com:
“TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”
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