Interesting Facts

According to a study conducted by Virgin Active, more than a third (38 per cent) of Brits aged 25 and over say they have no desire to try anything new. (It gets worse: 16% of 25-year-olds believe their favourite foods, travel destinations, hobbies and even their friendships will remain the same for the rest of their lives!   24% admitted that they avoid even trying anything new because they are frightened of being laughed at. When you think about it, that's laughable.)

Do you ever get a song stuck in your head? We call that kind of song an earworm (borrowed from the German word ‘ohrwurm'). Well according to research from the University of Reading chewing gum can get it out. (Their study found that people who chewed gum after hearing catchy songs thought less often about the song and it reduced the amount the song went round and round in their head. The study, "Want to block earworms from conscious awareness? B(u)y gum!" was published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. I wonder who financed the research?) Source

According to a new study conducted at Loughborough University, drivers who are dehydrated can be as dangerous as those who are drunk or on drugs. (The study showed that drivers who drank only 25 ml of water an hour made more than twice the number of mistakes as drivers who had drunk enough water. Professor Maughan, who published the findings, said, “We all deplore drink driving, but we don't usually think about the effects of other things that affect our driving skills, and one of those is not drinking and dehydration. There is no question that driving while incapable through drink or drugs increases the risk of accidents, but our findings highlight an unrecognised danger and suggest that drivers should be encouraged to make sure they are properly hydrated.” I can see it now:- Policeman: "Sir, you are 3 times over the legal limit." Driver: "At least I'm not dehydrated, officer.")

According to a study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, teenagers in the UK would be more likely to study maths at A-level if they were told what salaries it would help them earn in the future. (Telling students that pupils who received the information on graduate earnings were 39 per cent more likely to study maths than those who did not. Now if they could only convince them that maths could get you onto the X-Factor, and help you become famous, the take up would be 100%.)

According to research from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), a person who grows up in an average, reasonably positive home is told "no" over 148,000 times before they hit their 18th birthday. (On the other side, they are only told "yes" around 5,000 times. According to Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, and an expert in early language development, if you just say ‘no’ to a young child all the time, that child doesn'’t learn to use language to reason with you and others. 148,000 nos sounds like brainwashing to me. No wonder we are often negative, and more likely to think we can't do something, than taking the more positive view.)

According to neuroscientists, children who write using good old fashioned pen and paper learn better than those who use a keyboard. (A study carried out at the University of Stavanger in Norway showed that people who are learning new letters—such as children learning to read for the first time, or as adults picking up a second language with new characters— retain the information best when writing the letters by hand. One of the researchers, Anne Mangen, said, "The movement for “the typing of a T is no different than the typing of a Y. Furthermore, when you write something on the keyboard, you get the visual output somewhere else, on the screen, as opposed to watching your hand when you write on paper." I am so tempted to say "Told you so" again.)

According to research from the Department of Economics at Sheffield University, the secret to turning your children into savers is to not give them pocket money. (The researchers looked at the British Household Panel Survey, an annual study carried out by Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and found that those who were given a weekly sum of pocket money by their parents were less likely to put money aside than those with a part-time job. Sorry to let the cat out of the bag kids.)

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, more than a fifth of UK University students fail to finish their degrees. (But it seems to depend on the university. The study showed that 45.4 per cent of Bolton University students failed to finish their studies, and at London Metropolitan University, the figure was 44.4 per cent, but at Oxford University, only 3.6 per cent failed to complete the course they started. Why don't you finish what you started? Hmm I feel a song coming on.) Source