Have a break

We Have to Break Up.

Three mostly positive developments in academic psychology-the cognitive revolution, the virtual requirement for multiple study reports in our top journals, and the prioritization of mediational evidence in our data-have had the unintended effect of making field research on naturally occurring behavior less suited to publication in the leading outlets of the discipline. Two regrettable consequen...

Neurocomputational account of how the human brain decides when to have a break.

No pain, no gain: cost-benefit trade-off has been formalized in classical decision theory to account for how we choose whether to engage effort. However, how the brain decides when to have breaks in the course of effort production remains poorly understood. We propose that decisions to cease and resume work are triggered by a cost evidence accumulation signal reaching upper and lower bounds, re...

Study Break: Bacterial Cancer

Rarely, do we think of cancer as “bacterial”, such that we are often told that “cancer is NOT contagious” Persistent bacterial infections cause persistent irritation of the host’s defense systems, which when ineffective in eradication of the infection, result in a multitude of self-destructive damages. This in some cases occurs to such severity that the resu...

Break *

Forward and backward pericyclic photochemical reactions have intermediates in common, yet cyclobutenes break the rules.

Photochemical pericyclic reactions are believed to proceed via a so-called pericyclic minimum on the lowest excited potential surface (S(1)), which is common to both the forward and backward reactions. Such a common intermediate has never been directly detected. The photointerconversion of 1,3-butadiene and cyclobutene is the prevailing prototype for such reactions, yet only diene ring closure ...