【推荐2】When you hear the beginning of your favorite song from the radio, suddenly your neck is covered in goose bumps.

It's such a thing that a group of scientists call “skin excitement”—a feeling of cold caused not by a drop in temperature or sudden scare, but by the sense of beauty. “Skin excitement” can come from a song, a painting, a moving movie scene, or even a beloved memory-pretty much anything that causes the giving out of pleasure-soaked dopamine in your brain. But it does not come for all of us.

Your favorite music uncovers a lot about your personality，and so does how you respond to that music. Studies suppose that as few as 55 percent of people experience “skin excitement” when listening to music. And if you count yourself among this group, the goose bumps on your skin aren't the only giveaway—scientists can read it in your brain, too. In a new study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Harvard researchers performed brain scans on 10 students who said they reliably got cold when listening to music, and 10 students who didn't. They found that the cold-prone brains may really be excited by stronger emotions.

Cold-prone brains are generally more likely to show stronger emotional intelligence than no-cold brains. Cold-prone minds tend to have unusual active imagination, reflect more deeply on their emotions, and appreciate nature and the beauty of music and art to a stronger degree than no-cold brains.

So, what type of music causes the chills? It seems that the type is not so important; participants in the new study reported getting cold from songs of every kind. And any song connected with a strong emotional memory of the listener can produce the most reliable results. For me, that's the song Sailing to Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler, which I listened to as a kid in the car with my dad, on the way to the summer camp.

【推荐3】You definitely don’t want to have your head in the clouds when making an important business decision. But who could have thought our decisions are really influenced by height?

As in, what floor you happen to be on when thinking something over. If it’s a high elevation (海拔), like the top floor of an office tower, chances are you’ll take more risks than you would on the ground floor, according to researchers from Miami University.

The study suggests you may want a business advisor to work from a ground-floor office rather than the office on the top of a building. And it gives new emphasis to the idea that you should stay calm when making big decisions. “When you increase the elevation, there is a subconscious (潜意识的) effect on the sense of power,” lead author Sina Esteky, PhD said. “This heighted feeling of power results in more risk-seeking behavior.”

For the study, Esteky’s team interviewed people as they were moving up and going down in the glass elevator of a tall building. They found the direction of the elevator strongly influenced the level of risk among participants. They were more likely, for instance, to take more risks on the way to the 74th floor —— but their decisions became far more grounded as they neared the ground.

Another experiment focused on people who were either on the ground floor or the third floor of a university building. Each group was asked to make 10 decisions of different risk levels. Guess which group made the most risky decisions?

What was it about higher elevations that gave the participants more courage? Researchers thought it could have something to do with the idea that the elevation gives people a sense of power. When participants were told their decisions were being influenced by the elevation, they didn’t make risky decisions anymore. Likewise, “elevation effect” wasn’t a factor for people caught in small space who couldn’t see how high up they were.

“The important lesson is that when people become aware of the possible influence of the elevation, it doesn’t happen anymore,” Esteky says. “The brain is very easily affected by small situational factors, but also really good at correcting such effects, so awareness can help us be more rational in our decisions.”

【推荐2】The World Health Organisation has produced a report predicting that 9.8 billion of us will be living on this planet by 2050. Of that number,72 percent will be living in urban areas. Presented with this information, governments have a duty to consider how best to meet the needs of city residents.

Take New York City, a place where I frequently meet up with other researchers in my field. Luckily for me, I do not need to navigate the crowded streets. Admittedly my experience of the urban lifestyle here is limited to the hotels I stay in, and the blocks within a three-kilometre walk. But whenever I leave my room in search of a store providing fruit or anything with nutritional value, none can be found. New York has made great advances in redeveloping its museums and arts centres, but authorities must recognise that people’s basic needs must be met first.

Sometimes these basic needs are misunderstood. In some urban areas, new residential developments are provided with security features such as massive metal fences in the belief that these will make residents safer. There is little evidence that such steps make a difference, but we do know they make residents feel unwilling to go outside and walk around their neighbourhood. This adds up to a feeling of being cut off from others.

So where are planners and developers going wrong? Inviting a group of locals to attend a consultation event is the conventional method for discovering what a community might want. The issue here is that it often attracts the same few voices with the same few wishes. Successful development is taking place in many urban areas around the world. There is no better way for city planners to do this than to visit these places in person.