Before I studied psychology, I used to think that people would laugh when funny things occurred. While I was right about that, I discovered there are lots of other psychological factors that make people laugh other than the funny part of a joke. When someone laughs at a joke, there will usually be more than one reason that makes him laugh—and the more reasons there are, the more powerful the joke will be.

    I was attending a stand-up comedy show in Egypt, and when the man started to make fun of pedestrians crossing streets, everyone laughed their hearts out. The main reason those people strongly laughed was that almost all of them felt angry towards pedestrians who crossed streets carelessly. The joke wasn't only funny, it also made the audience feel that they were right about being angry at those pedestrians. That is, people were laughing both because of the funny joke and because of the happiness experienced as a result of the psychological support they got.

    The better a joke makes a person feel, and the more it includes other psychological factors, the more the person will like it. For example, if you envy one of your friends, and someone tells a joke that is funny and, at the same time, makes your friend seem stupid, then you will probably laugh at it louder than if you weren't jealous of him.

    In short, we don't laugh only when we hear something funny; we also laugh when we experience some kind of happiness that results from the other psychological factors involved in the joke. I strongly discourage making fun of anyone or belittling someone to make someone else laugh. All I want to explain is that if your joke supports a person's emotions, he will certainly like it a lot.

    I was sure that I was to be killed. I became terribly nervous. I searched in my pockets to see if there were any cigarettes, which had escaped their search. I found one and because of my shaking hands, I could barely get it to my lips. But I had no matches, they had taken those. I looked through the bars at my jailer. He did not make eye contact with me. I called out to him “Have you got a light?” He looked at me, shrugged and came over to light my cigarette. As he came close and lit the match, his eyes inadvertently（不经意地）locked with mine. At that moment, I smiled. I don't know why I did that. Perhaps it was nervousness, perhaps it was because, when you get very close, one to another, it is very hard not to smile. In any case, I smiled. In that instant, it was as though a spark jumped across the gap between our two hearts, our two human souls. I know he didn't want to, but my smile leaped through the bars and generated a smile on his lips, too. He lit my cigarette but stayed near, looking at me directly in the eyes and continuing to smile.

    "I kept smiling at him, now aware of him as a person and not just a jailer. And his looking at me seemed to have a new dimension too. “Do you have kids?” he asked. “Yes, here, here.” I took out my wallet and nervously fumbled for the pictures of my family. He, too, took out the pictures of his family and began to talk about his plans and hopes for them. My eyes filled with tears. I said that I feared that I'd never see my family again, never have the chance to see them grow up. Tears came to his eyes, too. "Suddenly, without another word, he unlocked my cell and silently led me out. Out of the jail, quietly and by back routes, out of the town. There, at the edge of town, he released me. And without another word, he turned back toward the town.

    “My life was saved by a smile.” Yes, the smile― the unaffected, unplanned, natural connection between people. I really believe that if that part of you and that part of me could recognize each other, we wouldn't be enemies. We couldn't have hate or envy or fear!

    What do you do when you need to look something up? Go to the library? Open an encyclopedia(百科全书)? Click onto the Internet? These days, most people go straight to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. But how reliable is it?

    There's no denying the popularity and usefulness of Wikipedia. It attracts as many as 78 million visitors every month, and the site is available in more than 270 different languages. It's one of the most comprehensive resources available, which includes almost all details, facts and information that may be concerned. It's got much more information than an ordinary encyclopedia. The site is updated on a daily basis by thousands of people around the world. Anyone with an Internet connection can log on and edit the contents or add a new page. And you don't need any formal training.

Of course, there are some controls. Wikipedia has a team of more than 1,500 administrators who check for false information. And main targets for harmful comments(such as politicians) are off-limits to public editing. But with more than 16 million articles to keep an eye on, it isn't easy. So, while Wikipedia benefits from being constantly updated with information from all over the world, it's also open to “vandals”（恣意破坏公共财物者）.

    Some of the damage is easy to notice. One person drew devil horns and a moustache on Microsoft chairman Bill Gate's photo, while another edited Greek philosopher Plato's biography to say he was a “Hawaiian weather man who is widely believed to have been a student of 'Barney the purple Dinosaur'.

    But other things are harder to spot. The most common form of vandalism (恣意破坏公共财物罪)involves adding tiny items of false information into the biography of a famous person. Unbelievably, some of this misinformation has appeared in newspapers, with The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Independent all having fallen victim to the dirty tricks. For example, in an article about British comedian Sir Norman Wisdom, one newspaper claimed that he co-wrote Dame Vera Lynn's wartime hit There'll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover. He did no such thing. And in other article, it was reported that TV Theme tune composer Ronnie Hazlehurst had written the S Club 7's hit Reach again, not true. So, if you're going to use any information from Wikipedia, make sure you double-check it first.

    Can I talk about salary at work? In a word: yes. As HR company Insperity put it in a recent blog post: Can your employees discuss their salaries or wages with their co-workers? Yes. Even if you have a company policy against it? Yes.

    The freedom to discuss your salary at work is a protected right under federal labor law. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects your right to discuss the conditions of your employment, including issues related to safety and pay, even when you're not protected by a union.

    Talking about salary with colleagues can be uncomfortable, since there's such a taboo about discussing money matters, but it's an important step towards achieving equal pay for equal work. One barrier, however, stems from how we think of our own financial worth. Too many people I talk to wrongly consider their salary a reflection of their worthiness, a statement about their skills, experience, or value. At the end of the day, if we can all separate our self-worth from our salaries a bit more, it'll become easier to talk frankly with our colleagues.

    Asking about money outright can be tough, so one trick I've picked up along the way is to ask for your colleagues to confirm or deny. For instance, you might volunteer your salary first and ask "Does that sound about right to you?" by way of comparison. Or, let's say you're interviewing for a promotion to become a manager. You might ask a fellow manager about the kind of salary you should expect by saying, “I'm seeing salaries for this kind of position ranging from $65, 000 to$70, 000—does that seem accurate to you?" This way, even if your colleague isn't comfortable sharing their salary outright, they can help you identify if your expectations are on point or way off.

Training the Brain

    People who can accomplish unbelievable tasks, such as memorizing thousands of random numbers in under an hour, state that they just have normal brains. Some memory superstars compete in Olympic-like World Memory Championships. These mental athletes, or MAs for short, can memorize names of dozens of strangers in a few minutes or any poem handed them. Ed Cooke, a 24-year-old MA, explains they see themselves as participants rescuing the long-lost art of memory training. These techniques existed not to recall useless information, but to cut into the brain basic text and ideas.

    A study in the journal Nature examined eight people who finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. The scientists examined whether their brains were fundamentally different from everyone else's or whether they were simply making better use of memorizing abilities we all possess. They put the MAs and control subjects into brain scanners and had them memorize numbers and photographs. The result surprised everyone. The brains of the MAs and those of the control subjects were indistinguishable. On every test, the MAs scored in the normal range. However, when the scientists examined what part of the brain was used during a memory activity, they found the MAs relied more heavily on areas in the brain involved in spatial memory.

    MAs offer an explanation: anything can be fixed upon our memories and kept in order by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with pictures of what needs to be recalled. Dating back to the fifth century, the building is called a memory palace. Even as late as the fourteenth century, when there were copies of any text, scholars needed to remember what was read to them. Reading to remember requires a different technique than speed reading. If something is made memorable, it has to be repeated. Until relatively recently, people read only a few books intensively (细致地) again and again, usually aloud. Today we read extensively, usually only once and without continuous focus.

    So the great difference is the ability to create impressive pictures in mind and to do it quickly. Using memory palaces, MAs create memorized pictures. For example, recombine the pictures to form unforgettable scenes such as the ways through a town. One competitor used his own body parts to help him memorize a 57,000-word dictionary.

    Anyone who wishes to train the mind needs first to create fantastical palaces in the imagination. Then they should cut each building into cubbyholes for memories. In a short amount of time, they will notice improvement with remembering things. To keep the skill sharp, MAs deliberately empty their palaces after competitions, so they can reuse them and they recommend that beginners do the same.

    Everyone knows that if a dog's ears are up and its tail is wagging vigorously, it is definitely pleased to see you, but now scientists using a robot have found that the way dogs use their tails is more complicated than we thought, and that dogs which wag them to the left may he more friendly. The animal psychologists discovered that when real dogs approached a life-sized robot dog, they were less cautious about it when it was wagging its tail to the left, while if it was wagging its tail to the right, far fewer dogs approached it in a confident manner.

    In the first experiments, 56 percent of the animals approached the model without hesitation when the tail was wagged to the left, while only 21 percent did so in the other situation. When the researchers excluded (排除) owners from being present, the result were: 31 percent of the dogs approached continuously when the tail was wagging to the left, while only 18 percent did so when it was on the right.

    Animal psychologist Roger Mugford said it added to the growing evidence that does were even more complicated communicators than the animals more closely related to man such as monkeys. He said, "We know that dogs, in a sense, have languages, but it is more complicated because it is not just them wagging their tails, but also giving out chemical displays."

    He adds, "The research confirms earlier studies suggesting that dogs, like humans, had a left-side preference. If you are going to present a signal to a dog, it is sensible to put it on your left-hand side because that is where dogs, unlike most other animals, tend to look. It is another example of the similarity between dogs and humans. They are a lot more human than we give them credit for."