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How Certain Gestures Help You Learn New Words
When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But if you also gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the vocabulary better, even months later. Linking a word to brain areas responsible for movement strengthens the memory of its meaning. This is the conclusion a research team reached after using magnetic pulses to deliberately disrupt these areas in language learners.
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How to Live When You’re in Pain
Arthur C. Brooks: When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it. A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling. A better definition of happiness is: It’s like a meal with three macronutrients. Just as a meal has macronutrients—or protein, carbohydrates, and fat—happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. I want to focus right now on that third macronutrient, on purpose.
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A Surprising Reason Why You Should Attend Live Theater
Could attending live theater make you a more empathetic person? Researchers recently found that after one live performance, theatergoers were more empathetic toward the issues and people portrayed in a play. And that empathy made them more likely to donate to charity. “Attending theater could be a vital way to build psychological skills, especially empathy,” says Steve Rathje, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Cambridge University and co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July.
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Economic Field Experiments Complement Understanding of Judgment Bias
Field experiments in economics can serve an invaluable intellectual role alongside traditional laboratory research.
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Why Children Learn Better Than Adults
Young children seem uniquely, insatiably, marvelously curious, even at risk of life and limb. You might think that this drive to explore helps children to learn so much so quickly. But is it really true that children explore more than grown-ups and that this helps them to learn? It’s not easy to test this idea scientifically. Grown-ups and children are so different that it’s hard to compare them. But in a new study just published in the journal Cognition, the NYU cognitive scientist Emily Liquin and I found a way to give children and grown-ups exactly the same problem. Sure enough, the children explored more and learned more—but at a cost.
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Fix Burnout—Without Blowing Up Your Life
The emails are piling up, unread. Deadlines are blown. Once jovial video calls are now tense. You suspect burnout. The feeling is an increasingly common one. In a September survey of nearly 700 professionals by consulting firm Korn Ferry, 89% said they were suffering from burnout. Some workers are leaving their jobs as a result. Others are moving to other cities or making similarly drastic changes. But you don’t have to quit your job to combat burnout. There are ways to self-assess, work with your manager and improve your mental health. “There is a tendency for people to view burnout as a personal mental health issue, so it’s their problem, not anybody else’s.
