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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).
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Be It Numbers or Words – The Structure of Our Language Remains the Same
It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of novel utterances every day. How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules—syntax. How abstract is language? What is the nature of these abstract representations? And do the same rules travel among realms of cognition? A new study exploring these questions—by psychologists Christoph Scheepers, Catherine J.
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Using Your Brain to Get Smarter
We may inherit a good deal of our intelligence, but that doesn't mean a person can't get any smarter. That is the upshot of the ongoing cognitive research presented by John Jonides of the University of Michigan during the William James Fellow Award Address this morning at the APS 23rd Annual Convention. "Fluid intelligence is often thought to be highly heritable, and some people draw the conclusion that it is immutable, and I hope to disabuse you of that idea today," Jonides said.
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Do We Dare to Change America’s Diet?
In his Bring the Family Address at the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Kelly D. Brownell of Yale University charged convention-goers to ask themselves whether we have the courage necessary to change America’s diet. Brownell, a psychological scientist and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, argued that this courage is essential because of the many obstacles – including powerful economic forces – that stand in the way of promoting health in the United States. Over the last 25 years, the rate of obesity has risen dramatically in the United States.
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Attention and Awareness Aren’t The Same
Paying attention to something and being aware of it seem like the same thing -they both involve somehow knowing the thing is there. However, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that these are actually separate; your brain can pay attention to something without you being aware that it’s there. “We wanted to ask, can things attract your attention even when you don’t see them at all?” says Po-Jang Hsieh, of Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore and MIT. He co-wrote the study with Jaron T. Colas and Nancy Kanwisher of MIT.
