www.SciAmMind.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 1

Mariette DiChristina

Executive Editor

editors@SciAmMind.com

(from the editor)

MINDBEHAVIOR • BRAIN SCIENCE • INSIGHTS

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EDITOR IN CHIEF: John RennieEXECUTIVE EDITOR: Mariette DiChristina EDITORS: Karen Schrock, Ingrid Wickelgren

ART DIRECTOR: Patricia NemotoISSUE PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR:

Bridget Gerety SmallPRODUCTION EDITOR: Richard Hunt

COPY DIRECTOR: Maria-Christina Keller COPY CHIEF: Daniel C. SchlenoffCOPY AND RESEARCH: Smitha Alampur, Rachel Dvoskin, Aaron Fagan, Aaron Shattuck, Kenneth Silber, Kevin Singer, Michelle Wright

EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR: Avonelle WingSENIOR SECRETARY: Maya Harty

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Phil Cohen,David Dobbs, Robert Epstein, Jonah Lehrer

BOARD OF ADVISERS:

HAL ARKOWITZ: Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona

STEPHEN J. CECI: Professor of Developmental Psychology, Cornell University

R. DOUGLAS FIELDS: Chief, Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

S. ALEXANDER HASLAM: Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, University of Exeter

CHRISTOF KOCH: Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology

SCOTT O. LILIENFELD: Associate Professor of Psychology, Emory University

STEPHEN L. MACKNIK: Director, Laboratory of Behavioral Neuropsychology, Barrow Neurological Institute

SUSANNA MARTINEZ-CONDE: Director, Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience, Barrow Neurological Institute

JOHN H. MORRISON: Chairman, Department of Neuroscience, and Director, Neurobiology of Aging Laboratories, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

VILAYANUR S. RAMACHANDRAN: Director, Center for the Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

DIANE ROGERS-RAMACHANDRAN: Research Associate, Center for the Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego

STEPHEN D. REICHER: Professor of Psychology, University of St. Andrews

Some of the articles in this issue are adapted from articles originally appearing in Gehirn & Geist.

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, PRODUCTION:

William Sherman MANUFACTURING MANAGER: Janet Cermak ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER:

Carl Cherebin PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER:

Silvia De SantisPRODUCTION MANAGER: Christina Hippeli CUSTOM PUBLISHING MANAGER:

Madelyn Keyes-Milch

Say SoScience often offers a corrective counterpoint to well-intentioned (but sometimes mistaken) folk wisdom and sayings. As we prepared this issue for you, several such aphorisms came to mind. I thought I’d set the record straight on a few of them.

Laughter is the best medicine. That phrase is far from empirically proved, but it contains more than a germ of truth. As you will learn in “Laughing Matters,” by Steve Ayan, starting on page 24, a good guffaw has powerful physiological and men-tal benefi ts. Listening to jokes relieves anxiety. Mirth eases stress and even, as stud-ies have revealed, chronic pain. It bolsters the psyche, making you more resilient. Just forcing a smile can lift your spirits. If that were not enough to show that being jolly improves your satisfaction with life, a sense of humor is sexy, too.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Not so. Since the 1970s research has shown that the brains of older adults are much more plastic than once believed. And as you get older, you not only can learn new tricks, you also should tackle mental challenges to help yourself stay sharp. You might, for instance, do Sudoku, crossword puzzles—or one of the growing number of brain-training software games. Our in-trepid reporter Kaspar Mossman pitted his gray matter against a battery of eight games over eight weeks. See page 32 for his review, “Brain Trainers.”

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Actually the statistics aren’t lying: we simply misunderstand them—or others misuse them by preying on our fears and ignorance. We are beset by headlines about disease risks and what cer-tain medications can do. How to make sense of it all? Although most Scientifi c Amer-ican Mind articles provide insights into the workings of the brain and behavior, they also offer information about how to exercise better critical thinking. “Knowing Your Chances,” by Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues, explains what various kinds of risk mean and how to interpret statistics. And you thought your math classes were a total waste of time! Turn to page 44 to fi nd out how to take control of those numbers.