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Giant Brain Candy: A Maybe Can Hurt More. People learning when painful shocks might come felt and showed the most stress when a shock was a 50/50 toss-up, not when it was certain to come. Source: Uncertainty and stress.
Growing evidenceThe research
  1. de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996.

Journey 7 · Uncertainty

A Maybe Can Hurt More

People learning when painful shocks might come felt and showed the most stress when a shock was a 50/50 toss-up, not when it was certain to come.

Source: Uncertainty and stress · Growing evidence

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Giant Brain Candy: The Worries That Never Came. People treated for chronic worry logged their worries for ten days and checked back 20 days later: 91.4% of the worries had not come true. Source: How often worries come true.
Giant Brain Candy: Check Again, Trust Less. People who checked a virtual gas stove again and again grew less sure they had checked it, as their memories grew less vivid, though their memory stayed just as accurate. Source: Repeated checking and memory.
Giant Brain Candy: Curiosity Makes Memories Stick. Curiosity engages the brain’s reward circuits and boosts memory: when people were curious about a question, they remembered its answer better, and even unrelated faces shown while they waited. Source: Curiosity, reward and memory.
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