Many people today find that there are not enough waking hours to accomplish all we need to do.  Work, long commutes, email, family responsibilities and household chores can eat up much of our waking time.

In order to get chores done or get in a little extra leisure time, many cut corners on sleep.  We rationalize that a few hours here and there won’t make much difference.

But sleep deprivation can have effects on both your mental and physical health.

So what are these negative effects of not getting enough sleep?

We take a lot of traditions for granted, and rarely think to ask questions about not only why we do something a particular way, but whether that something actually works or is good.

Take, for example, the lowly red marking pen.

Long used by teachers, professors, copyeditors and others to highlight wrong answers or problems that need correcting on a paper, a test, or something else submitted for approval, the red pen has been ubiquitous.

But red is an emotional color. People respond strongly to it, either negatively or positively. So using it can evoke unintended emotions where none are required (or worse, interfere with the feedback loop).

So does the color red interfere with feedback in the real world, when professors are grading college papers? Let’s find out.

In October 2012, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to find if they could exercise complete control over habitual behaviors in mice.

By inhibiting a small region of the prefrontal cortex — region of the brain responsible for planning and thought — the scientists were able to break the mice’s habits, but, to their surprise, the mice immediately began forming new behavior patterns.

Until now, psychologists and behavioral therapists believed that habits were hidden in the illusive “subconscious.”

But the MIT study shows that the brain is not just aware of habits: it controls them completely, moment by moment. And no matter how long the habits have existed, we can now shut them off, as by the flip of a switch.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. ~Yogi Berra

Yep. That’s me in my fabulous Nehru tux getting ready for my prom date. I was about as spiffy then as spiffy could be. The tux was rented, but I had my regular Nehrus in the closet. They were next to my bell-bottoms, tie-dyes and 8-tracks.

What happened?

The Nehru went out of style around 11:55 p.m. the night of the prom and I had to hang on to my bell-bottoms and tie-dyes for about 30 years for them to come back around into fashion. The 8-tracks? They gave way to those newfangled cassettes.

How could I have been so wrong about the future of Nehrus and 8-tracks? Actually, when I think about it, I was wrong about a lot of things: The Afro perm I thought would look spectacular on me forever, the Beatles never breaking up, my best friend Kevin and I being pals for life, the Osborn 55-pound “portable” computer, and the 8-track tape player (which cost me a week’s salary) I had installed in my car. Naturally I thought my prom date would never change.

But in spite of my convictions at the time I was about as wrong as wrong could be. The good news is I am not alone.

Recently, on my way home from the gym, I walked by a stand selling Christmas trees and holiday greenery (in New York City, these pop up on street corners every December). I loved getting the chance to smell that wonderful fragrance of Christmas tree.

It struck me: I’ve done a lot of holiday decorating, but we don’t have any holiday smells.

Because it’s so hard to deal with a real tree in a New York City apartment, and because we always spend a week at my parents’ house at Christmas — where my mother puts up the largest and most gorgeous display of holiday decorations you’ve ever seen — we don’t put up a live tree. We use a small grove of tabletop, goose-feather trees to show off our ornaments. I’ve been collecting one ornament a year since I was a baby, and my girls have, too, so we have quite a few.

But an artificial tree doesn’t have a smell.

Pollution can be ugly.  Just think of an industrial chimney spewing smog into the air.  It has devastating effects on the environment, plants and wildlife.  And we know that pollution has a negative effect on our physical health.  Since the 1970s, a recent article in Monitor on Psychology reports, we’ve studied the harmful impact of pollution on our cardiovascular and respiratory health.

A growing body of evidence indicates that the impact of pollution goes beyond physical health.  According to the Monitor, researchers have found that high levels of air pollution may damage children’s cognitive abilities, increase adult risk of cognitive decline and may even contribute to depression.

The issue is not as visible or taken as seriously as it should be, according to Paul Mohai, PhD, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources.

We humans don’t come with an instruction manual. If we did, I suspect we’d do a better job of getting through life with less pain and more joy.

Human behavior has evolved over time. What worked for us humans a few thousand years ago may not be as helpful today. So while our behavior adapts to the changing times and environment, it’s thought that it never completely forgets its evolutionary roots.

One of the driving forces of some human behavior is something called the “fight or flight response” (also known as the acute stress response). This is the psychology term that describes one of the ways we can react when under stress.

Understanding the purpose of the fight or flight response can lead to greater insights into our own behavior when we’re stressed out.

Scientists have long studied exercise and its impact on any number of physical and emotional factors, including bone density, cardiovascular disease and stress.

But if we take the mind-body connection one step further and study exercise and cognitive functioning, will we see a link?

Some people can’t get enough of scary movies. They’ve seen scores of scary films – over and over. They catch horror flicks on opening night. They have DVD collections at home.

Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a scary movie. They freak me out, leaving me unsettled for days — the images a record player in my mind. In fact, I have a hard enough time sitting through the scarier scenes of “Sons of Anarchy.” (I watch it with my boyfriend, and sometimes need to leave the room.)

With Halloween upon us — the prime season for horror films — I was curious to find out why some people savor scary movies. And others, like me, can’t stand them.

If you’re an avid reader, you’ve probably had a moment when your book felt more real than the world around you.  Curled in a favorite spot, you may have felt almost as if you were in Narnia, had traveled through middle-earth with Frodo Baggins, or felt Holden Caufield’s adolescent confusion and angst.

Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips frequently had such experiences.  She would become so lost in a book that the world around her would feel less real than the world created in the novel she read.

Curious as to how this distraction — or perhaps more accurately, absorption in a book — affected the brain, she decided to conduct a study. 

Phillips teamed up with neuroscientists from Stanford University to determine if there were differences in brain activity between, casual, somewhat distracted skimming vs. captivated and engaged reading.

What did they find?

Dr. Peter Coleman knows a lot about conflict.  A self-described natural peacemaker, Coleman got his first experiences resolving conflict as a mental health counselor at a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s — a time when riots were not uncommon.

But the conflicts he discusses in his new book, The Five Percent, are not those routinely found in a psychiatric hospital.  Dr. Coleman, a psychology professor at Columbia University, has made a career of studying intractable conflicts.

Intractable conflicts are those that are highly escalated, with repeated acts of violence.  They often involve high stakes (take for example the territorial dispute between Pakistan and India over the Kashmir region) and are win-lose scenarios — upon resolution, only one side will gain. Participants often see no way out, as any resolution would require them to give up too much.

How much do your taste buds have to do with your weight? Anything? Everything?

In a recent study researchers compared taste sensitivity in obese children and adolescents to that of healthy weight children and adolescents.  According to this study, taste sensitivity is linked to weight.

Children and adolescents who were obese had less sensitive taste buds.  That means for obese children sweet foods tasted less intensely sweet, bitter foods were milder and salt was not as readily perceived.

What do these differences in taste perception mean?