One disease everyone 'Likes'!

With millions of people 'Liking' senseless Facebook pages left, right and centre, the social network's integrity drops yet another notch. Like it or not.

Excuse us, we’re about to send in a petition of life threatening intensity to the Health Minister. Because this is an urgent problem at hand. It’s about time browsing Facebook got listed under strenuous exercise. The trauma of hitting ‘Ignore’ at all the Farmville requests, Mafia Wars invites and It-Girl requests, and actually ignoring pages filled with comments like “Like this page plzzzzzzz” makes an hour on the treadmill seem inviting. And if you’ve been patting yourself on the back for permanently disabling all games and ‘Like’ requests, we got news for you: it’s time to pop a headache pill again because spammers won’t let you scoot away that easy. There’s now a new way of irritating the s*** out of you… and that is by creating Facebook pages on EVERY possible topic under the sun and spamming every popular Facebook page with the link and a message saying “Like this page guyzzzz, galzzz, fraandzzzz”. So for every Indian anti-Justin Bieber page that makes your heart swell with pride, there are 10 pages that make you think about how jobless the country’s youth actually is to come up with this!

We pick some of the best (read worst) of this lot:

1. I Hate Facebook

Likes:  2,500. Yeah, you read that right. 2,500 people can’t stand Facebook and it never occurred to them to simply disable their accounts.  They went as far as hunting down an ‘I Hate Facebook’ page and join it AND get updates from it daily, but never to just get off of the goddamn thing!  And people wonder why Facebook has a bad name.

2. “MERE PAAS BANGLA HAI, GADI HAI , PAISA HAI.........TUMHARE PAAS KYA HAI????????...............................JAA YAAR SIR MAT KHA...............MERE PAAS KUCH NAI HAI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!TU KHUSH REH”

If the 58,073 people (losers!) who liked this page thought Facebook is free, they have another think coming – we’re about to charge all of them 10 bucks so that we can send Amitabh Bachchan a huge bouquet. A bouquet of love for having murdered this absolutely epic dialogue! And if the people on this page – who seemingly agree with this statement – got down to DOING something, they’d ACTUALLY stand a chance at having the aforementioned objects!

3. “YES,I HAVE AN EGO PROBLEM,AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM.BUT WATS YOUR PROBLEM WID DAT,”

Okay, so all 12,380 of you, tell us who paid you to like this page? This page reeks of Dolly Bindra through and through. Lack of netiquette: check; improper grammar: check.  Our in-house ACP Pradyuman suspects Dolly Bindra threatened you guys with a picture of her in a dark pink velour suit. It’s okay, we forgive you this one time.

4. Good friends don’t let you do stupid things

Likes : 1.9 million. Yeah, well, good friends don’t let you like stupid pages either. About time you delete all those thousands of people off your carefully cultivated friend list. If they really cared about you, they would never let you run amok with a mouse and computer liking pages all over the place. And please do not immediately start searching for a ‘No One Cares for Me’ page!

5. Agar duniya me mehnat ki Qadar hoti To GADHA sabse jyaada izzatdar hota :P,

Okay, spammers, we give up. The numbers just keep increasing. How exactly do you get people to like such stuff? We guess it’s only the truly gifted who can inspire 17,024 Facebook users to ‘Like’ stuff that makes no sense whatsoever.  We warn you, though… one click towards our profiles and we shall set Bob Biswas on you. True story.

Image source: northerndom.wordpress.com

Content Source : http://mtv.in.com/blogs/general/humour/one-disease-everyone-likes-8061.html

How does the human brain decide which memories to store?

In a year alone, we experience hundreds of thousands of small events that have the potential to become memories. Yet our brain will only store a certain number of these memories (or at least only allow us access to some of them). 

How does the brain decide which memories are stored?


The brain uses a number of automatic mechanisms to determine what information to retain. Everything else naturally fades away.

The brain's overriding principle, given to it from millions of years of evolution, is to retain whatever is likely to be useful later for long-term survival. Since the future utility of information is impossible to predict, the brain uses a number of heuristics that have been honed over the millenia.

Here are some of the most well studied:

repetition -- Things that happen repeatedly are either highly significant or irrelevant. However even if they are irrelevant -- like the background noise that you tune out -- they must be identified so that they can be removed from perception. When studying for a test, students often use repetition to activate the brain's importance circuits.

primacy and recency -- Things that happened first are often more important because they predict what comes later. And things that happened most recently are often the most relevant because they are closest to the present. Things in the middle tend to get forgotten. This is why so many presentations start and end with an overview of the key points.

surprise -- Anything that is unusual stands out. This can include an uncanny coincidence or an event that led to something unpredicted. An entertaining science teacher will ask students to guess what will happen and then show that the opposite happens. Setting up the experience of surprise increases retention. If you are thinking of calling someone and the phone rings and its them, you will remember that for a long time because the coincidence is so unusual, while forgetting all the times you thought of calling them and the phone didn't ring.

emotional impact -- Emotions are one of the ways the brain prioritizes perception and action. Emotions are a way of assessing and categorizing situations according to their role in our instinctual survival program. A moment correlated with a strong emotional state will be retained for a long time, which is why, for example leading up to a car accident, people have the memory of time slowing down and noticing every detail. Time didn't actually slow down -- it's just that a lot of detail got recorded and so the event is remembered this way.

leads to positive or negative outcome -- The systems in the brain that learn behaviors and habits are especially tuned to the eventual outcome of an action or perception. This is why addictive activities such as gambling can be so tenacious. With a slot machine, most of the time nothing happens, but sometimes the bells ring and the sign flashes "winner!". Each dose of "reward" ensures that more quarters go into the machine. Addictive drugs like nicotine and cocaine activate reward circuits directly, causing everything that led up to taking the drug to be given automatic priority by the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter central to signaling reward and activating procedural memory formation. When something leads to a strongly unpleasant outcome, emotional circuits label the preceding events as fearful.

( Content from : http://www.quora.com/Neuroscience-1/How-does-the-human-brain-decide-which-memories-to-store?__pmsg__=+OFRnRngtRXFsNk5qNGpTNXdWbzg6YS5hcHAudmlldy5wbXNnLmFsbC5Mb2dnZWRJbkZyb21MaW5rOltbMzgzODI5OF0sIHt9XQ**#ans1124882 )