The Tooth Fairy Rots Your Brain

JAMES HAMBLIN

"Children's beliefs in the reality of fantastic phenomena [may] give rise to genuine constructive memory errors in line with their fantasies."

“To examine how children’s fantasy beliefs can affect memory for their experiences, 5- and 6-year-olds with differing levels of belief in the reality of the Tooth Fairy were prompted to recall their most recent primary tooth loss in either a truthful or fun manner. Many of the children who fully believed in the existence of the Tooth Fairy reported supernatural experiences consistent with the myth..., whereas those who realized the fictionality of the myth recalled mainly realistic experiences."

Define "supernatural" and "realistic," science.

If you're looking to purchase children's drawings of the tooth fairy, consider this one, available in 5 x 7 for $7.49 plus shipping.

Keep in mind, you're buying a print, not the original. 

If you're looking for the original, hand-drawn kid tooth fairy drawings, stained with the tears shed as the they watched their parents sell them, talk to me.

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Classic Bait And Stitch

JAMES HAMBLIN

Daily Mail does a segment called Me and my operation, wherein a patient describes what surgery they had done, and then the surgeon describes what surgery they did. This way the patient can use words like "gullet" and phrases like "I used to eat a couple curries every week," and the doctor can say things like "involves cracking the chest open" and "the oesophagus is a tube," and no one seems condescending at all. (Oesophagus is the British esophagus. It's a tube.) Then, at the end, you find out the patient is actually a doctor trying to pretend like he doesn't really understand. Also the doctor is an airline pilot trying to pretend like he does understand. But then they just laugh and are glad everything went okay.

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The Real-Life Like Button

JAMES HAMBLIN

What compels us to share things on Facebook/Twitter/etc? A study at Penn tells us that when an article evokes a "high arousal" emotion (anxiety, amusement), we're more likely to share it. That's not too surprising, right, but the cooler part to me was the corollary study in which people read a neutral article while either sitting or running on a treadmill. The people who were running when they read the article ended up being more likely to share it.

So we should all be running all the time? Because running elevates your mood and you're more likely to share when you're happy? Or just people who run are more likely to be disoriented and lightheaded, clicking buttons to and fro?

I think there should be actual "Like" buttons on physical things out in the world. Big, blue, glowing things that make pleasing noises when you push them. They could read your fingerprints and synch to your account. And when you're at a certain store, you can just hit this giant Like button on the wall. Or if you like a certain kind of car, you can hit the button on that car. If you see a famous person, you can like them on their forehead.

I don't know, but then maybe the runners would go around liking/sharing tons of stuff while they're out and about, and Mark Zuckerberg could get rich. Then he would issue everyone free blue running shoes in the mail, and on and on and on.

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