【推荐2】After a breakup, you might think you’re doing fine until you hear a particular love song on the radio. No matter how much you’d like to stop thinking about your ex (前任), everything is a reminder of the relationship. So, is it possible to erase unwanted thoughts?

The short answer is: maybe. But whether it’s advisable to do so in the long term is a difficult question. In some situations, it makes sense to suppress these unwanted thoughts. In an exam or job interview, for example, you don’t want to feel distracted (分心) by the thought that you’ll fail. And there’s evidence that it’s possible to prevent these thoughts, said Joshua Magee, a clinical psychologist.

In a 2022 study, researchers showed 80 volunteers a series of cards showing different nouns. Each noun was repeated on five different cards. As they viewed the cards, the volunteers wrote down a word connected with each noun—for example, “road” in response to the word “car”. The researchers told the first group they had to think of a new word each time they were shown a card. The second group could repeat as many nouns as they wished. With this method, the researchers tried to emulate (模拟) what happens when someone hears that love song on the radio and tries desperately to think of anything other than their ex.

The results showed that when volunteers saw each noun for a second time, the first group took longer than the second group to come up with a new word—suggesting that their first response flashed into their mind before they replaced it. However, volunteers in the first group got quicker each time they viewed the same card, which showed that the thought they were trying to avoid was weakening.

However, other research suggests that avoiding thoughts can cause the opposite effect. When we hold back a thought, we’re making the thought more powerful by attempting to control it.

In the end, it might make more sense to be careful about these unwanted thoughts and simply wait for them to pass rather than avoiding them.

【推荐1】In 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford conducted a famous study of creativity known as the nine-dot puzzle (九点谜题). He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. All the participants limited the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the confinement (束缚) and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford to jump to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral. Overnight, it seemed that creativity experts everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The concept enjoyed such strong popularity that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams-Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg-ran another experiment.

Both teams followed the same way of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box. Guess what? Only 25 percent solved the puzzle. In statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement is insignificant as this could be called sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at the surprising result. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and clear instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless should effectively have killed off the much widely spread — and therefore, much more dangerous — metaphor (比喻) that out-of-the-box thinking boosts creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a misunderstanding.

【推荐1】Bird expert James Zook has been collecting records on nearly 430 kinds of tropical birds on farms and natural forests in Central America for 18 years. While birds do best in natural rainforests, Zook said some species usually found in forests can establish populations in “diversified farms”.

“In these diversified farms, you see growth over the long term in bird species with specialized needs, which include safe and protected areas from the sun for birds to build their homes and different kinds of food sources. Besides, that kind of farming is very different to industrial agriculture or agriculture where only one crop like pineapple or bananas are planted,” said Nicholas Hendershot in a recent study.

University of California environmental scientist Natalia Ocampo-Penuela, who was not involved in the study, notes that the research provides rare detailed data over a long period, demonstrating that diversified farming can support forest bird populations.

The study reveals that 75 percent of the 305 bird species found in diversified farms showed stable or growing populations over the study period. This includes birds like the collared aracari and members of the manakin family known for their complex mating dances.

Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center scientist Ruth Bennett, although not involved in the research, said, “It’s a huge contribution to have documented that some birds aren’t just going there, but staying there and populations are growing.”

Increasingly, scientists say saving species will require paying attention to areas affected by humans, not just untouched areas. Ocampo-Penuela says that conservation efforts should extend beyond protected areas to areas where some species can live.

【推荐2】In late 2022, Matthew Pittman and Eric Haley carried out three studies on Americans aged 18-65 to test how people in different situations react to ads differently.

The control group in each study was asked to just look at an ad. The second group had to memorize a nine-digit number and then look at an ad. The third group looked through their Instagram updates for 30 seconds before looking at an ad. The first study used an ad for a meal preparation service, the second was for ice cream and the third was for coffee beans. The ad photos and introductions were the same for everyone in each group, with only the number of likes being different. Participants may see an ad with a few hundred likes or tens of thousands of likes. After viewing the ad, each participant rated how willing they would be to buy the product. The group that used Instagram first was the most likely to want to buy the product when there were lots of likes.

In the second study, participants were asked why they wanted to buy the product and those in the control group gave simple, reasonable answers for their choice. “I was thinking of the taste of the ice cream and how delicious it would be.” Or “I like the ad. It’s simple and clean. It gets straight to the point.” However, most of those who had viewed social media content for 30 seconds gave answers that made no sense. For example, some gave one-word answers like “food” or “plate”. Researchers refer to this as “cognitive overload”.

Then the researchers further developed their study of the ad for coffee beans. And they discovered that those who often drank coffee carefully considered many factors, like the type of the beans and their country of production. So even when these people were in a mental fog, they were not convinced by ads with a large number of likes.

By understanding how they might be influenced by social media in unconscious ways,   consumers can be more thoughtful and hopefully won’t buy a product they don’t need.

【推荐3】Spain's tourism industry is looking to Chinese tourists for its high-end market, according to Rafael Cascales, president of the Spain-China Tourism Association (ATEC). “It is the kind of tourism that is not only interested in the sun, beach and the “all-included” culture. They enjoy culture, wine, history and nature, and the new Chinese tourists would also want to spend more money in Spain," said Cascales in a recent interview with Xinhua.

“They are younger, more women travel and they are more cosmopolitan (见多识广的).They also travel on their own or in couples or in smaller groups. The old-fashioned large groups of visitors have not disappeared, but this new form of traveling is becoming more important,⁵⁵ he said.

Speaking of the consumption pattern of the new kind of Chinese tourists, Cascales said, “The money they spend is distributed better because they will book one flight with one airline, the hotel with another company and the restaurant with another.” In his eyes, “Chinese tourists are very important because they combine two things: there are a large number of them and they spend more money than anyone else — almost four times more than tourists from other countries." They not only travel abroad in the summer months when Spain has to compete with the sun and beaches in countries such as Turkey and Egypt, but also travel in the off-peak seasons of a year, according to Cascales.

In 2017, Spain is the second most popular tourist destination in the world, only after France. It attracted about 82 million visitors, 700,000 of them from China, a number which is estimated to rise to about 2.2 million by 2022.

“We are ready; we have the infrastructure (基础设施) at every level, especially in hotel capacity. Here those visitors can find what they are looking for, including the luxury items which distinguish them,” Cascales noted.