Brain Trust

The promise

Somewhere on a university server sits a peer-reviewed paper that answers, with data, the question rattling around your head this week: how to study so it sticks, why you keep buying things you never meant to buy. It's public, it's free, and you are never going to open it — twenty pages of methods, regression tables, and an abstract written for the ten other specialists in the subfield. Useful knowledge isn't locked away; it's written in a language almost nobody speaks.

That is the bottleneck Garth Sundem goes after, with an almost insolent solution: if the problem is translation, don't translate — ask the person who ran the study what they'd actually do on a Tuesday morning. Out of that came seventy-five short entries, each anchored to a named researcher.

We are not going to walk through those seventy-five. We picked five and sorted them by a standard the book could never apply to itself: how long each one lasts. It hit shelves on March 6, 2012, and the decade that followed was the most uncomfortable stretch experimental psychology has lived through. Some of those pages aged like stainless steel; others aged like raw milk.

The idea in one image

Picture the pantry in a house where nobody writes dates on anything. Top shelf, cans of tomatoes; on the floor, a sack of rice; middle shelf, a carton of half-and-half somebody opened at some unrecorded point in the past. All three are stored with the same care, and at a glance all three look equally edible. Yet between them sits a difference measured in years: the can holds for a decade, the rice a couple of years, the cream three days.