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Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests
The hush at the end of the musical performance. The pause in a dramatic speech. The muted moment when you turn off the car. What is it that we hear when we hear nothing at all? Are we detecting silence? Or are we just hearing nothing and interpreting that absence as silence? The “Sound of Silence” is a philosophical question that made for one of Simon & Garfunkel’s most enduring songs, but it’s also a subject that can be tested by psychologists. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds.
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To Stay Sharp as You Age, Learn New Skills
In most adults, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline after age 30 or 40. People start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper after 60 years of age. These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But what if instead they represent something more like the “summer slide” that schoolchildren experience? Every year teachers and parents observe how summer vacations lead some children’s academic progress to backslide.
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Trouble Achieving Goals? Why Your Brain Needs Reminders.
Many of us set goals, but sometimes we fail to achieve them. There is a way, though, to increase our chances of hitting our goals: Set reminders. “It’s quite hard to achieve our goals,” said Sam Gilbert, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London. “There are many, many reasons why we get led astray, or we don’t manage to realize our goals.” One common, but addressable reason is that we simply forget them. Psychological studies suggest that 50 to 70 percent of our everyday memory failures involve forgetting our intentions. Creating reminders can help address this problem. Research explains why.
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When a Brain Injury Impairs Memory, a Pulse of Electricity May Help
If you've ever had trouble finding your keys or remembering what you had for breakfast, you know that short-term memory is far from perfect. For people who've had a traumatic brain injury (TBI), though, recalling recent events or conversations can be a major struggle. "We have patients whose family cannot leave them alone at home because they will turn on the stove and forget to turn it off," says Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, who directs the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania. So Arrastia and a team of scientists have been testing a potential treatment. It involves delivering a pulse of electricity to the brain at just the right time. ...
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How Bad Is Screen Time for Kids, Really?
Screen time has been a hot-button topic for parents for decades and particularly over the past few years. The rise of personal devices like tablets, phones and smart watches, along with the use of screens in schools, has made screen time common for kids. Data also shows that screen time skyrocketed during the pandemic as parents struggled to juggle working with managing their children being at home. Screen time guidelines have changed slightly over time. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) used to recommend no screen time at all for children until 18 to 24 months, and limiting kids ages 2 to 5 to an hour or less of screen time a day. ...
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Wendy Wood: It’s Time We Trained Students for Diverse Careers in Psychological Science
Podcast: Only about half of psychology PhDs are hired in academia, but psychology graduate training in the United States has largely retained the classic graduate training model of a direct path to an academic job. It’s time to change that, says Wendy Wood.
