The Best Kept Secret for Boosting Your Creative Power

You know the phrase, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”? There just may be some wisdom in that. A survey conducted by TNS Global on behalf of Ebates.com found that more than half of Americans (52%, including 64% of women and 40% of men) admit to engaging in “retail therapy”—the act of shopping and spending to improve one’s mood. This echoes a previous study, published in the Journal of Psychology and Marketing, that revealed 62% of shoppers had purchased something to cheer themselves up, and another 28% had purchased as a form of celebration.

Chances are you’ve recently heard or read about the importance of “executive function”—the set of higher-order mental skills that allow us to plan and organize, make considered decisions, manage our time and focus our attention. (The famous “marshmallow experiment” was all about executive function.) No matter how smart or talented we—or our kids or our employees—are, not much will get done well without these key capacities.

The reaction to the arrest of Julian Assange, with "celebrities" coming to his defence, reminds me of that to the arrest of Roman Polanski last year.

(Karen_Chappell)

Econophile submits: I would like to feel sorry for Ben Bernanke because of his bumbling and confusion about what to do about the economy, but I can't. Every time he turns around he does the wrong thing.

Ira Stoll submits: "With competitors like China, India and the others, the belief that our big fat national government can somehow subsidize, much less identify, the U.S.'s next creative edge is straight from the dusty book of the original flat-earth society," writes Daniel Henninger in today's Wall Street Journal, noting a Pew poll that found 44% of Americans call China the world's leading economic power.

Zacks.com submits: Life Technologies Corporation (LIFE) is aiming big in the field of stem cell research. The company presented its offering of stem cell research at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).

The herbal supplement ginkgo biloba does not slow cognitive decline, a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) said.Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh analyzed data in an eight-year randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial called the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory (GEM) study, for which half of the 3,069 participants were given daily doses of ginkgo biloba and the other half were given a placebo.