Clever Corvids

[tealin]

This is awesome:

Rooks Corroborate Aesop

And now from the realm of human psychology, proof that we who procrastinate do it because we're special: Abstract thinkers tend to put things off more! Really, it's a wonder anything gets done at Disney at all ...

From The Economist, the concrete version of events

From Newsweek, an abstract take on the experiment

I wonder who turned in their copy first ...

Comments

[danicarip.livejournal.com]

Item One:
*Fantastic.* Thanks so much for posting this :D

Item Two:
When I read that the birds were named Cook and Fry, I immediately thought of Peter Cook and Stephen Fry, and didn't realize the culinary correlation for several minutes. I'm far more British than any Oregonian should be... xD

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Well, the research was done at schools in England; they could very well have been named after those men. To be honest I had not made the culinary connection until you mentioned it.

[ubiquitouspitt.livejournal.com]

This is why I want to smack to bits anyone who says 'writing isn't work'. I have been an ordinary seaman/merchant marine. Writing a chapter of make-believe is far more taxing, on me at least, than hauling lines, sanding rust off the deck, or any of the numerous straight-forward physical tasks I had to perform when I worked for WHOI.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I used to work with a guy who, before animation, had done something in construction (drywalling?) and, he said, he went to the gym every night after work. Once he started working in animation, which requires one to sit still at a desk all day and think, he said he was so exhausted it's all he could do to haul his butt home. So it's not just you.

[ledygrey.livejournal.com]

WAIT!! Once a first-class procrastinator, I'm becoming *shudder* punctual. Does this mean I'm losing my analytical capabilities??

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Don't think so. I think punctuality is something you can train yourself in, though perhaps abstract thinkers need more training than concrete ones. Eighteen years of rigourous conditioning against daunting odds by my concrete-thinking parents made me a punctual person (as long as the deadline matters, anyway) but if nothing else, the more rambly, hypothetical entries on this blog prove my abstract faculties are doing well ...