Everybody in this world is different from one another. But do you know that understanding differences can help you better manage your money?

As we grow up, we gradually develop a set of our own values or beliefs. These are influenced by society, our family, the education we receive and so on. Once this value system is set up, it’s not easy to change later in life.

Financial (金融) experts say that everyone also has their own belief of how to manage their finances. This is part of our value system and it has a great impact on the way we look after our money.

According to our different values, experts put us in three categories. They are: the ant, the cricket and the snail.

The ant—works first

Just like ants who work heart and soul in summer in order to store food for winter, these people don’t care about enjoying the moment. They work very hard and save money they earn so that they can enjoy life when they get old and retire. The ant loves to save but they could make more out of their money if they were willing to invest(投资) in some funds and stocks with low risk.

The snail refers to people who make life difficult for themselves. They take big long-term loans (贷款)from the bank in order to buy things such as luxury(奢华的) houses. They are happy to take big loans even though they are not sure they can afford it. This can cause problems in the future. They should plan more carefully.

Do you think it enough to have eight hours of sleep per might? Napoleon didn't agree with it. His saying went something like this: "Six hours for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool." But Napoleon's words weren't right, either. The ideal amount of sleep is different for everyone and depends on many factors, including age and genetic makeup.

In the past 10 years, my research team has surveyed sleep behavior in more than 150,000 people. About 11 percent slept six hours or less, while only 27 percent clocked eight hours or more. Most people fell in between. Women tended to sleep longer than men, but only by 14 minutes. Bigger differences are seen when comparing various age groups. Ten-year-olds needed about nine hours of sleep, while adults older than 30, including senior citizens, averaged about seven hours. We recently-found the first gene related to sleep length—if you have one kind of this gene, you need more sleep than if you have another.

Although it's common to hear warnings about .getting too much sleep—and 80 percent of the world uses an alarm clock to wake up on workdays—it's not difficult to figure out how much sleep we need. We sometimes overeat, but we generally cannot oversleep. When we wake up naturally, feeling comfortable, we have slept enough. In our modern society, we sleep about two hours less per night than 50 years ago. This sleep deprivation greatly decreases our work performance and harms our health and memory.

You try to keep your eyes wide open while watching a basketball match or a marvelous firework show in case you might miss something exciting in just the blink of an eye. But in fact, humans blink about 15 times per minute on average. Have you ever missed anything because you blinked? Probably not. Why is that?

According to a new study published in journal Current Biology in September, our brain has the ability to “skip” the temporary darkness that we see when we blink. It can keep visual information for a short period of time and then put it together to form a conclusive image without interruption.

In order to understand how this works, a group of scientists at the German Primate Center and the University Medical Center Gottingen in Germany conducted an experiment.

In the study, the participants were asked to look at patterns on a screen whose orientation(方向)could be shown in different ways, such as horizontally( 水平的) or vertically( 垂直的).When one pattern was about to disappear and the next one was about to come, the participants had to indicate the direction that the next pattern would be oriented in.

The researchers found that when the orientations of two patterns didn’t match, the medial prefrontal cortex(内侧前额叶皮层)--- the area in our brain which is responsible for visual memory---was activated. This same area showed less activity when two patterns were in the same direction.

“The medial prefrontal cortex adjust current visual information with previously obtained information, and thus enables us to see the world with more stability, even when we briefly close our eyes to blink,” Caspar Schwiedrzik explained in Science Daily. He is the first author of the study and also a scientist at the German Primate Center.