Eyesight improves when people expect to have especially keen vision
Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That’s a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer.
Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.
Langer’s new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from …

They are taken to exams, job interviews and weddings in the hope they will bring good fortune.
But rather than being mere superstition, lucky charms do actually work, psychologists claim.
Researchers told half the golfers on a putting green that they were playing with a lucky ball, and the rest that they were playing with a normal one.
The research found that golfers given a ‘lucky ball’ managed to sink 35 per cent more putts than those who were playing with an ordinary ball.
Those with the lucky ball sank 6.4 putts out of …

A woman giving birth shunned conventional pain relief in favour of being hypnotised
When Louise Walker, 30, went into labour with baby Harrison she employed Paul Hazell, hypnotherapist, to put her into a trance. Mrs Walker, of Hull, East Yorks., said: “I am the biggest sceptic. I thought I would need all the pain relief going but I was gobsmacked when I didn’t have any at all.
“I was crying with the pain, but as soon as he started, I felt really relaxed. When the contractions came, there was hardly anything.”
Hypnosis involves …

Handling a wad of cash may be as good at killing pain than ibuprofen or aspirin, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota carried out a series of studies which revealed those who counted money before taking part in an experiment where they were subjected to low levels of pain felt less discomfort than those who did not.
Its thought that fondling notes and coins helps ward off pain by boosting feelings of self-worth and self-sufficiency. Previous studies have shown those with a greater sense of self-worth may be …

The brains of some elderly people with super-sharp memory seem to escape the formation of destructive “tangles” that increase with normal aging and peak in people with Alzheimer’s. A study of the brains of people who stayed mentally sharp into their 80s and beyond challenges the notion that brain changes linked to mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease are a normal, inevitable part of aging.
In a presentation at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Changiz Geula, principal investigator of the Northwestern University Super Aging Project and a …