Sundays, Fridays Particularly Important Travel Days In 2018

Sundays, Fridays Particularly Important Travel Days In 2018 - Here’s a general rule of thumb for booking air travel in 2018: To score the best international economy fares, clear out your Sundays and book your departure flight for Friday. And whatever you do, avoid making any kind of reservations on Fridays.

That’s the latest advice from a major report released jointly by Expedia and the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which combed through flight data spanning Sept 1, 2016 to Aug 31, 2017 to identify patterns on the best times to book air travel, and best times to fly in 2018.

With a few exceptions, the numbers show that Sunday is the best day of the week to sit down at your laptop or scroll through your smartphone to find the best flight deals. This is true of most countries around the world with the exception of travelers departing from Australia, Iceland, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, Peru, Singapore, Thailand and Tunisia.

Overall, the same is true for booking domestic flights.

The finding, once again, debunks the widely circulated claim that Tuesday is the best day of the week to book.

Meanwhile, for added savings, the second part of the booking formula dictates that for international economy flights, the best day to start your journey is a Thursday or Friday, with the exception of flights departing from Fiji or Saudi Arabia.

By contrast, Friday is the worst day in general to book your flight, as the average ticket prices are most expensive.

The report also offers advice on the cheapest months to fly for international travel.

For example, travellers who are planning a trip to Hong Kong, Malaysia or Singapore in 2018 will see the biggest savings if they travel in the month of March, while November is the cheapest month to travel to Thailand and South Korea.

Travel to Japan is forecast to be cheapest in January, while travel to China is predicted to be cheapest in December.

The cheapest month to embark on an international flight for travellers in Canada and the US, meanwhile, is February.

For Europe, the cheapest months for international travel in general are March, May and September.

And the magic month for international travel to Australia and New Zealand? March.

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Does Playing Action Video Games Change Your Brain?

Does Playing Action Video Games Change Your Brain? - New international research has found that playing action video games could have a beneficial effect on the brain by expanding its cognitive abilities, including perception, attention and reaction time.

Led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, the research team together carried out two meta-analyses on research spanning the last 15 years to look at how video games can affect cognition.

As the human brain is malleable and can learn and adapt, many previous studies have looked at whether playing action video games could cause brain changes that lead to improvements in perception, attention and reaction time.

For the new study, the team focused in on one genre in particular, action video (war or shooter) games, which have long been considered as “mind-numbing”, rather than a way of boosting brain power.

“We decided to assemble all the relevant data from 2000 to 2015 in an attempt to answer this question, as it was the only way to have a proper overview of the real impact of action video games,” explained Dr Daphne Bavelier, professor in the Psychology Section at UNIGE’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE).

Chicken or the egg?

First, a team of psychologists from UNIGE and the universities of Columbia, Santa Barbara and Wisconsin, all in the United States, looked at data from a total of 8,970 individuals across the world between the ages of six and 40, including action gamers and non-gamers.

All participants completed a number of tests to measure their cognitive abilities, such as spatial awareness, e.g. being able to quickly detect a dog in a herd of animals.

The team found that the cognition of gamers was better than that of the non-gamers; however, the findings did not answer a key question.

“We needed to think about what the typical gamer profile is,” points out Dr Benoit Bediou, researcher in the FPSE Psychology Section.

“Do they play action-type video games because they already have certain cognitive skills that make them good players?

“Or, on the contrary, are their high cognitive abilities actually developed by playing games?”

To investigate, the team carried out a second meta-analysis, looking at 2,883 men and women who played games for a maximum of one hour a week.

Participants were tested to assess their cognitive abilities and then randomly divided into two groups, with one playing action games (war or shooter games) and the other playing control games (SIMS, Puzzle, Tetris).

Both groups played for at least eight hours over a week, and up to 50 hours over 12 weeks, before completing more cognitive tests to measure any changes.

The result overwhelmingly showed that those who played action video games improved their cognition more than those playing the control games, with Dr Bediou commenting that, “The research, which was carried out over several years all over the world, proves the real effects of action video games on the brain and paves the way for using action video games to expand cognitive abilities.”

However, the results of a Canadian study published earlier this year found that while playing action video games can change the brain, some changes could be detrimental.

Carried out by the University of Montreal, the researchers found that those who play action games regularly have less grey matter in their hippocampus, a major part of the brain.

The smaller the hippocampus becomes, the higher the risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from depression to schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

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