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The Visual Language of Comic Books Can Improve Brain Function
Here’s a tradition that has persisted for generations: Kids huddle outside the doors of their local comic book shops—clutching their weekly allowance, babysitting money, loose change scavenged from between sofa cushions—just itching to get their hands on the latest issue of Superman, The Amazing Spiderman, or Teen Titans. And accompanying this tradition are the unenlightened parents who roll their eyes at the stacks of glossy paperbacks avalanching to the floor, sighing “Well, at least they’re reading something.” ... Traditional text is limited to presenting the same information sequentially.
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European Research Council (ERC)
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ERC Magazine
Stay up to date with the latest news from the European Research Council (ERC) by reading the ERC Magazine.
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Start Fresh: 6 Tips For Emotional Well-Being In 2020
As a college student, Katy Milkman played tennis and loved going to the gym. But when she started graduate school, her exercise routine started to flunk. ... What got her back to regular workouts was something she calls "temptation bundling." She resolved to indulge in her love of wizard-lit only while at the gym, by listening to audiobooks with earbuds. Milkman, now a professor at the Wharton School of Business who specializes in human decision-making, says that when it comes to making a behavioral change, the trick is to pair the thing you dread with something you love.
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The Fourth Commandment Of Highly Effective Leadership: Counter Your Negative Thoughts
Professor Martin Seligman is known as the father of positive psychology. In his popular TED Talk, he argues that most psychologists are fixated on finding what’s “wrong” with people, while he insists on finding what’s “right." His theory, and the theories of so many positive psychologists, are based on a study he conducted with a large group of children who were at risk of depression. In his book, Learned Optimism, Seligman shares how he taught the children to control their negative or pessimistic thinking using Dr. Aaron Beck’s cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) model.
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Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings
Writers and filmmakers hoping to hoodwink their fans with plot twists have long known what cognitive scientists know: All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We get distracted. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable ... In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brain scan? If a plot twist works by exploiting our biases and mental shortcuts, can observing the mechanics of a good story reveal something important about the contours of the mind?
