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Are Poor Kids More Altruistic?
New York Magazine: Altruistic behavior toward strangers, a growing body of research has found, brings with it emotional and health benefits. This can help explain what has traditionally been seen as the "mysterious" aspect of the behavior — why help someone you don't even know or really care about? But as Jonas G. Miller, Sarah Kahle, and Paul D. Hastings of UC - Davis write in a new paper just published in Psychological Science, "less is known about the possible benefits ... of altruism in earlier childhood." To learn more about this, the researchers got a group of 74 preschoolers together for an experiment.
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Why Entrepreneurs Who Complain Are Setting Themselves Up to Fail
Entrepreneur: Your problems are proportional to the amount of time you spend complaining about your problems: The less you complain, the fewer problems you will have. This is because complaining about your problems keeps your attention on your problems. And attention generates force. ... The squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. The squeaky wheel breaks down and gets replaced. If you want to attract failure, talk about your problems. If you want to attract success, talk about what makes you happy. A study published in the journal Psychological Science and reported in Science Daily examined how people responded to positive versus negative social media-status updates.
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How the Brains of ‘Super-Multitaskers’ Are Different
New York Magazine: Multitasking, we’ve been told constantly in recent years, is something human beings aren’t naturally good at. Even though technology has given us more opportunities than ever before to, say, work while checking in on an NBA score, or have a conversation while sending a text message, such multitasking works against the human brain’s natural strengths. When you try to do more than one thing at once, there’s an inevitable hit to your performance on all the tasks involved. That’s because it takes cognitive energy to switch between tasks — as I put it in 99U’s book on productivity, there is really no such thing as multitasking — there is only task-switching.
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The Neurology of Lending
The Huffington Post: Back in 1976 a young professor in Bangladesh starting making dubious low-interest loans to the rural poor of his country. Muhammad Yunus had the crazy idea that even impoverished farmers -- men and women without credit history or collateral or even steady employment -- could be disciplined and trustworthy in repaying small loans, and he founded the Grameen Bank to finance that vision. Many banks eventually followed Grameen's lead, despite some serious misgivings, and "microfinance" is now a huge global enterprise. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million men and women held microloans totaling $38 billion, and Grameen claims a repayment rate between 95 and 98 percent.
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Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here’s how it changes your brain
The Washington Post: Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain. She explains: Q: Why did you start looking at meditation and mindfulness and the brain? Lazar: A friend and I were training for the Boston marathon. I had some running injuries, so I saw a physical therapist who told me to stop running and just stretch. So I started practicing yoga as a form of physical therapy.
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A Key Researcher Says ‘Grit’ Isn’t Ready For High-Stakes Measures
NPR: If you've followed education in the news or at the book store in the past couple of years, chances are you've heard of "grit." It's often defined as the ability to persevere when times get tough, or to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal. Alongside growth mindset and self-control, grit is on a short list of not-strictly-academic skills, habits and qualities that researchers have deemed essential. And that research has quickly made its way into the hands of educational leaders eager to impose accountability measures that can go farther than standardized math and reading tests.
