Did you hear what happened at yesterday’s meeting? Can you believe it? If you find those sorts of quietly whispered questions about your co-workers irresistible, you're hardly alone. But why are we drawn to gossip?

A new study suggests it’s because the rumors are all about us”. Gossip receivers tend to use positive and negative group information to improve, promote, and protect the self,” writes a research team, led by Elena Martinescu of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the researchers described two experiments team, led by Elena Martinescu of the University described two experiments testing the personal value gossip receivers get.

The first featured 178 university undergraduates, who had all previously worked on at least one course assignment with a group of four or more students. Participants were asked to recall and write a short description of an incident, in which a group member shared with them either positive or negative information about another group member’s secret. They then reported their level of agreement with a series of statements. Some of these measured the self-improvement value of the gossip (“The information received made me think I learn a lot from X”); others measured its self-promotion value (“The information I received made me feel that I am doing well compared to X”). Still others measured whether the gossip raised personal concerns (“The information I received made me feel that I must protect my image in the group”).

In the second experiment, 122 undergraduates were assigned the role of “sales agent” at a major company. They received gossip from a colleague that a third person either did very well or very badly at a performance evaluation, and were then asked about the emotions that information caused. They also responded to the above-mentioned set of statements presented to the participants in the first experiment.

In each experiment, participants found both negative and positive gossip to be of personal value with different reasons. “Positive gossip has self-improvement value,” they write. “'Competence-related positive gossip about others contains lessons about how to improve one's own competence. On the other hand, negative gossip has self-promotion value, because it provides individuals with social comparison information that justifies self-promoting judgments which results in feelings of pride.”

In addition, the results showed that negative gossip brought about self-protection concerns, the researchers write. “Negative gossip makes people concerned that their reputations may be at risk, as they may personally become targets of negative gossip in the future, which generates fear”. Fear is hardly a pleasant sensation (感觉), but it can be a motivating one. As researchers put it: “Gossip conveniently provides individuals with indirect social-comparison information about relevant others.”

The world’s clocks mark every passing second, minute and hour. But to humans, seconds of pain can feel like minutes, and hours spent at a party can end in a blink.

The brain can stretch or squeeze the feeling of time for many reasons, including pleasure, pain, fear and age. Although the science behind this “subjective time” is not fully understood, some research suggests that an additional factor might influence the subjective length of your life: your income.

Research already suggests that, on average, wealthy people live longer, biologically. Now, emerging work indicates that varied and novel experiences could create more “time codes” in the human brain as it processes memory formation. This, in turn, could mean that people who can afford to enjoy more vacations and hobbies, and who have more stimulating jobs, will recall having lived for a longer time on Earth.

“Even though time flies when you’re having fun, when you look back on it, you can remember much more of this extended experience compared to a boring experience,” says Jorgen Sugar, a postdoctoral student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. He’s part of a team of scientists investigating these mental time codes.

The idea that novelty can affect the experience of time also seems to fit cultures that don’t measure time using clocks-many cultures rely instead on celestial (天空的), cultural and seasonal events to mark the flow of time. “Our experience of time does vary according to circumstances, and also according to the kind of rhythm of activity we engage in,” says Chris Sinha, a cognitive scientist working with Hunan University who has studied so called “event-based time” in Amazonian tribes and linguistic minority groups in China.

But other experts aren’t convinced. According to Monica Capri, an economist with a background in neuro-economies at Claremont Graduate University, subjective time isn’t well understood scientifically. Even if higher-paid jobs can lead to more new experiences, wealthy people aren’t necessarily spending money that way. A millionaire, for instance, may spend money on a fancy watch, but this isn’t likely to change their feeling of time the way a vacation or even a low-cost hike would, she says.

What’s more, she says, there are many factors to consider in how the brain processes time. For instance, according to Adrian Bejan, a professor at Duke University, the novelty of fun experiences can simply wear off.

Still, researchers from many fields are eager to uncover the mysteries of memory and subjective time. According to Sugar, understanding how humans form and recall memories can affect many aspects of society, such as law, education and health care-and perhaps can even aid our understanding of ourselves. “The human brain is the most complex biological system we know,” he says.

If you are over 20, look away now. Your cognitive （认知的）performance is probably already on the wane. The speed with which people can process information decreases at a steady rate from as early as their 20s.

A common test of processing speed is the “digit symbol substitution test”, in which a range of symbols are paired with a set of numbers in a code. Participants are shown the code, given a row of symbols and then asked to write down the corresponding number in the box below within a set period. There is nothing cognitively challenging about the task: levels of education make no difference to performance. But age does. Speed declines as people get older.

Why this should be is still uncertain, but a range of tentative（尝试性的）explanations has been put forward. One points the finger at myelin, a white, fatty substance that coats axons, which carry signals from one neuron to another. Steady reductions in myelin as people age may be slowing down these connections. Another possibility, says Timothy Salthouse, director of the Cognitive Ageing Laboratory at the University of Virginia, is exhaustion of a chemical called dopamine（多巴胺）.

Fortunately, there is some good news to go with the bad. Psychologists distinguish between “fluid intelligence”, which is the ability to solve new problems, and “crystallised intelligence”, which roughly equates to an individual’s stock of accumulated knowledge. These reserves of knowledge continue to increase with age: people’s performance on vocabulary and cognitive decline. In an old but instructive study of typists ranging in age from 19 to 72, older workers typed just as fast as younger ones, even though their tapping speed was slower. They achieved this by looking further ahead in the text, which allowed them to keep going more smoothly.

What does all this mean for a lifetime of continuous learning? It is encouraging so long as people are learning new tricks in familiar fields. “If learning can be absorbed into an existing knowledge base, advantage favours the old,” says Mr Salthouse.