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When the Melody Takes a Detour, the Science Begins
The New York Times: In the middle of a World Science Festival panel on Saturday night, the guitarist Pat Metheny took a sudden U-turn from the program he had planned. Instead of performing one of his innovative compositions, plucked from any of the phases of his career as a style-shifting jazz omnivore, Mr. Metheny, performing with the bassist Larry Grenadier, decided on the spot to play a jazz standard. And not just any jazz standard, but an especially ubiquitous one: "Autumn Leaves." Read more: The New York Times
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Why So Much Abuse Is Allowed to Continue in Residential Care
TIME: The stories are beyond horrifying: an autistic boy crushed to death by a "restraint" gone awry; a disabled woman's diaper pulled aside as she is raped; an elderly woman left to lie on a urine-soaked box spring for six days after being beaten. In two of the nation's largest states, major media investigations this spring revealed hellish conditions in institutions for the disabled: The New York Times exposed ongoing violations, including physical and psychological abuse, in state-run homes for the developmentally disabled, while the Miami Herald uncovered similar tales of maltreatment and neglect in assisted-living homes for the elderly. Read more: TIME
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Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution…
Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot. And analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling. Why? Is it random? Is it cultural? Or does it have evolutionary roots? A new study of male rhesus macaques strongly suggests it’s evolution. “The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D.
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Depressed People Find It Hard to Stop Reliving Bad Times
U.S. News & World Report: A new study suggests that depressed people suffer from an inability to rid themselves of negative thoughts because they can't turn their attention to other things. "They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again," said study co-author Jutta Joormann of the University of Miami in an Association for Psychological Science news release. "Even though they think, 'Oh, it's not helpful, I should stop thinking about this, I should get on with my life,' they can't stop doing it." Read more: U.S. News & World Report
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The Case for Financial Procrastination
TIME: In our first TIME Moneyland post, we explore an issue we’ll return to a lot: the effect of framing and state of mind on financial choice. Framing is one of the aces in the deck of cards that make up behavioral economics; and state of mind powerfully influences how we frame our financial decisions. It’s ironic that people generally consider many factors when making financial decisions but rarely give enough weight to their own state of mind and body. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that how we’re feeling — literally, how we physically feel at a given moment — can affect our decisions about all sorts of issues, including those that have nothing to with those feelings.
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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas
The New York Times: Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations).