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Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking
Scientific American: I often find myself walking into the kitchen (or the living room or bedroom or wherever), unable to recall why I was going there in the first place. What I do in those cases is retrace my steps, until I am back to where I began my trip. And more often than not, the location triggers the precise association that prompted me to move in the first place, and I triumphantly return to the place of forgetfulness, ready to do whatever it is that needs doing. In this case, I’m exploiting the close contextual nature of memory: our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving.
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Concussion testing for student athletes is common, but some question its worth
The Washington Post: If you have a child playing ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer or football this fall, chances are good he or she has taken a computerized examination called ImPACT, for Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. About 2 million U.S. athletes of all ages have taken the test, which measures mental abilities such as word and shape recall, reaction time, attention and working memory. Athletes are given a baseline test at the start of a season; those who suffer a concussion are tested again before being allowed to return to play. The increased prevalence of ImPACT reflects growing public unease about the state of our kids’ gray matter.
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Forgetting Is Part Of Remembering
It's time for forgetting to get some respect, says Ben Storm, author of a new article on memory in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We need to rethink how we're talking about forgetting and realize that under some conditions it actually does play an important role in the function of memory,” says Storm, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm says. Memories and associations accumulate rapidly.
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Learning The Look of Love: That Sly ‘Come Hither’ Stare
Scientific American: While it might not be witchcraft, the formula for ‘love at first sight’ remains a mystery. However, if you pop the following ingredients into a kettle: large pupils, long glances, and a lovely, attentive smile, you may not have concocted a bona fide love potion but your witch’s brew could contain some insight into the laws of attraction. Being an optometrist and all around eye aficionado, I have a deep interest in the connection between the eyes and love.
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What Happens To Our Decision-Making Brain As We Age
Huffington Post: It's 2031, and you are among the first humans to set foot on Mars. You and the other pioneering astronauts have discovered that there is actually a small amount of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, but you need to figure out how to extract it. The future colonization of the Red Planet depends on your success in this task. Imagine you're the leader of this mission, and you have two oxygen extraction systems that might work. You need to pick someone to test the two competing systems, and you have two equally qualified candidates. One is an up-and-comer, just turned 20 and eager to make his mark. The other is 67, a veteran. Which do you put in charge of this crucial job?
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Profanity on TV Linked to Foul-Mouthed Kids
U.S. News & World Report: Is TV turning our kids into fountains of four-letter words? Maybe so, says a new study that finds a link between foul-mouthed inner-city children and profanity-ridden shows and video games. However, the research doesn't confirm that exposure to trash-talking adults directly leads to swearing among kids, nor does it explain why non-aggressive cussing might be a bad thing. And the actual size of the possible effect is unknown, although the study's lead author called it "moderate." "As a society we've gotten pretty lax concerning profanity. We're desensitized to it," said the author, Sarah M. Coyne, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University.