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Advancing the Science of Imagination: Toward an “Imagination Quotient”
Award amounts up to $200,000. The Imagination Institute announces an international grants competition for research and intervention projects on the measurement and improvement of imagination. Deadline: September 30, 2014 For more information go to: imagination-institute.org
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How to Get Your Kids to Tell the Truth
New York Magazine: Only a social scientist would look at a classic, beloved children's story about the importance of honesty and ask, "I wonder if this is an empirically effective way to reduce lying in children?" But it's a good question, first because instilling honesty in kids is important for obvious reasons, and second because we actually don't know — we tell these stories out of tradition, not a rigorous sense of whether they're doing the work we expect of them. A research team led by Kang Lee of the University of Toronto set out to answer this question — with an interesting study.
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The Best Way to Predict the Future
BBC: Cast your mind back across the turbulent events of recent history. Did you foresee President Obama’s election before he was even elected as a Democratic candidate – or did you back Hillary Clinton? How about the Arab Spring – could you hear the revolution in the first tremors of dissatisfaction? And did you faithfully predict the recent Ukraine crisis? If you answer yes to these questions, you could be a “super-forecaster”, someone who is able to foresee the outcome of world events with astonishing accuracy. This has nothing to do with the reading of tea leaves; nor do you have to be a seasoned political pundit.
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Music Changes the Way You Think
Scientific American: Hum the first two notes of “The Simpsons” theme song. (If you’re not a Simpsons fan, “Maria” from West Side Story will also do.) The musical interval you’re hearing—the pitch gap between the notes—is known as a “tritone,” and it’s commonly recognized in music theory as one of the most dissonant intervals, so much so that composers and theorists in the 18th century dubbed itdiabolus in musica (“devil in music”). Now hum the first few notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or, if you prefer something with a little more street cred, the “I’m sorry” part in Outkast’s “Ms.
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In Defense of Brain Imaging
National Geographic: Brain imaging has fared pretty well in its three decades of existence, all in all. A quick search of the PubMed database for one of the most popular methods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), yields some 22,000 studies. In 2010 the federal government promised $40 million for the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map all of the human brain’s connections. And brain imaging will no doubt play a big part in the president’s new, $4.5 billion BRAIN Initiative. If you bring up brain scanning at a summer BBQ party, your neighbors may think you’re weird, but they’ll be somewhat familiar with what you’re talking about.
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Masters of Love
The Atlantic: Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth. Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.
