In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how our brains process information differently based on the mode of consumption.

The idea that money doesn't make you happy is easy to get behind if you have it, but if you don't it can be a hard concept to buy into (pun intended). Yet the correlation between money and happiness is more complicated then one might think. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the relationship between money, security, opportunity, memory, and happiness.

As it turns out, the way we answer that question defines the relationship itself. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about the various ways we understand the economics of the relationships in our lives, and why the value of community should never be underestimated.

For example, when people look up, fidget or stutter they might just be nervous, and not exactly lying. However, because we rely on the truth to make our culture go round, it might make our lives easier if we could just spot a liar out of the crowd. As it turns out you can tell if people are telling the truth or not, but it takes some skill, time and knowledge. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about lying, and a new study that reveals a more...

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the relationship between sleep, age and cognitive decline.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how and why placebos can make us feel better.

Forgiveness, as Dr. Markman points out, benefits the forgiver. It allows us to get past the wrong we’ve received and move on. If we don’t forgive we have a hard time forgetting the negative elements of the event, and subsequent interactions are therefore imbued with retribution; it’s hard to start over. But what if my enemy is not sorry? In fact, that doesn’t really matter from a psychological perspective. You can still reap the benefits of forgiveness even if your aggressor doesn’t repent....

Coincidences stand out to us because they are salient. We notice them, but with the amount of ideas, people places and things coming into our brains everyday, it's not uncommon to have overlapping content. It's just that we are not very good at understanding the probability of things occurring simultaneously. As an exercise try to think of how many things pop into your head each day that don't have a corresponding "match," and you might get a different answer to your question when you ask,...

Most of us can recall a time when the mere funny feeling of the lining of a sock caused us (or our children) to spiral into a hour of uncontrollable tears, screams and thrashing about. This is what we like to call a tantrum. The question for parents and caregivers is, what is the best way to deal with a tantrum? There are a couple things to remember when it comes to tantrums. The first is that kids throw tantrums, in part, because their brains are not yet fully developed. The region of the...

"He slit a sheet, a sheet he slit, upon a slitted sheet he sits." Okay now, five times fast. Tongue twisters and rhymes are a great way to entertain yourself and your friends at parties and on long road trips, but what makes for a good tongue twister and how do they work in the brain? As it turns out, the structure of a syllable lends itself to our linguistic foibles, but it's more than that. So much of how language works in the brain is automatized, and so when we focus on how we form...

In this special holiday edition of Two Guys On Your Head, we'll explore questions about the link between freewill and gratitude, why we feel so compelled to recreate traditions exactly as we remember them, and why yawning is contagious. Plus, we'll take a trip to The Thinkery with Dr. Cristine Legare.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss how and why we misperceive how memory works in the brain.

For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years. While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of re-centering. Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we...

No pain, no gain. There is a common misconception in our society that the more we have to exert ourselves to accomplish something, the higher the value of that accomplishment. It feels very rewarding to create the positive feedback loop in our minds that we’ve endured suffering in order to reach a goal. That’s how our minds work. At the end of a challenging task, we like to reap the rewards of our exertion. When it comes to physical exertion, those rewards are usually benefits like...

After age 80, many bodily functions – including brain function – seem to have reached the average limit of their operation. So what can we do to preserve our brains for as long as possible?

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the development of Artificial Intelligence and what it might mean for humans in the near future.

In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the history and development of intelligence tests; as well as what these tests can actually tell us about ones ability to achieve.

In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the evolution of our psychological responses to fear.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about what goes into our ability to naturally be happy, and how we can influence our perspective to feel more positive.

For those of us who have friends or relatives recently becoming acquainted with the phenomenon of the internet, or just people in our lives who like to scan the latest meme trail, we might be frequently introduced to the latest cat video meme. Even if we have better things to do, it seems so hard to resist watching those things when we have the chance. What the… ? Why? On this week’s show, Dr. Art Markman, Dr. Bob Duke and host Rebecca McInroy discuss the riveting topic of cat...

While you can spend all of your leisure time focused on brain exercise, in the hopes that it will make you smarter, there are many other activities that could improve your brain just as much. In reality, all of life is brain exercise. Playing piano, reading for leisure, or building a dog house are all great activities that develop different cognitive skills, just as well or better than playing a game on the computer. The truth is, there are all kinds of pleasurable activities that will...

Procrastination is the all-too-familiar foe of productivity, but why do some wait until the last minute to even get a project started? It also comes down to evolution of the human brain. The frontal lobe is the behavior and –planning controlling part of the brain that also regulates the distribution of dopamine. However, it’s also the most recently-evolved section of the brain – meaning it’s occasionally overridden by baser, more primal desires. So overcoming this age-old cognitive...