Imagine you made plans with a new friend to talk on the phone. You called but there was no answer-and you didn’t get a call back. What happened? Perhaps they got held up by a work obligation. Perhaps they didn’t want to meet but didn’t bother to cancel. Or perhaps they had a busy week and simply forgot to write down your appointment time.

In social situations like this, our minds can produce various explanations, ranging from ones that are more understanding to ones that put blame to the other party. Psychologists refer to this as our attributional style. Past research has found that individuals with a “hostile” attributional style tend to be less satisfied with their relationships.

According to a new study, they’re also less happy overall. The researchers can’t say for sure whether seeing people as hostile directly lowers our happiness, or whether unhappy people are just more likely to make hostile attribution in the first place. However, this study does suggest the possibility that giving people the benefit of the doubt is a practice to improve our relationships and well-being.

Dorota Jasielska, lead researcher of the study, suggests that we start by developing positive and trusting social relationships. When we find ourselves surrounded by warmth and support, it can help us see the social world in a kinder light. Another important strategy is to have open and direct communication. Instead of letting your anxieties get worse, it may be better to simply talk to people about their confusing behavior.

So the next time a friend cancels plans or forgets to text back, consider giving him the benefit of the doubt and waiting to hear his side of things before jumping to conclusions. Assuming others have good intentions will make the world seem like a friendlier place.

You may have heard that humans only use ten percent of their brain, and that if you could unlock the rest of your brainpower, you could do so much more. You could become a super genius, or acquire psychic powers like mind reading.

This “ten-percent myth” has inspired many references in the cultural imagination. In the 2014 movie Lucy, for example, a woman develops godlike powers thanks to drugs that release the previously inaccessible 90 percent of her brain.

Contrary to the ten-percent myth, however, scientists have shown that humans use their entire brain throughout each day.

Over the years, brain scientists have shown that different parts of the brain are responsible for specific functions, whether it’s recognizing colors or problem solving. Contrary to the ten-percent myth, scientists have proven that every part of the brain is integral for our daily functioning.

Research has yet to find a brain area that is completely inactive. Even studies that measure activity at the level of single neurons(神经元) have not revealed any inactive areas of the brain.

Many brain imaging studies that measure brain activity when a person is doing a specific task show how different parts of the brain work together. For example, while you are reading this text on your smartphone, some parts of your brain, including those responsible for vision and reading comprehension, will be more active.

A more direct counter to the ten-percent myth lies in individuals who have suffered brain damage – like through a stroke(中风)– and what they can no longer do, or do as well, as a result of that damage. If the ten percent myth is true, then damage to many parts of our brain shouldn’t affect your daily functioning. Studies have shown that damaging a very small part of the brain may have devastating consequences.

If someone experiences damage to Broca’s area(布罗卡氏区), for example, they can understand language but can’t speak fluently.

In one highly publicized case, a woman in Florida permanently lost her “capacity for thoughts, perceptions, memories, and emotions that are the very essence of being human” when a lack of oxygen destroyed half of her brain.

Handwriting notes in class might seem outdated as smartphones and other digital technology cover every aspect of learning across schools and universities. But a steady stream of research continues to suggest that taking notes the traditional way is still the best way to learn, especially for young children. And now scientists are finally zeroing in on why.

The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study suggesting that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information,” she says. But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it — prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.

To understand specific brain activity differences during the two note-taking approaches, the researchers sewed electrodes (电极) into a hairnet with 256 sensors that recorded the brain activity of 36 students as they wrote or typed 15 words from the game Pictionary that were displayed on a screen.

When students wrote the words by hand, the sensors detected widespread connectivity across many brain regions. Typing, however, led to minimal activity, if any, in the same areas. Handwriting set off connection patterns covering visual regions, which receive and process sensory information, and the motor cortex (运动皮层). The latter handles body movement and sensorimotor integration, which helps the brain use environmental inputs to inform a person’s next action.

Sophia Vinci-Booher, an assistant professor of educational brain science at Vanderbilt University, says, “People may not realize when they materialize something by writing or drawing it, this strengthens the concept and helps it stick in their memory.”