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To Boost Memory, Shut Your Eyes and Relax
TIME: Forget brain-training exercises, 12-hour shifts and those long, uninterrupted, caffeine-fueled study binges. When you really need new information to sink in, you can’t skimp on taking breaks, new research suggests. That’s the message from a soon-to-be-published study by psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, who asked a small group of normally aging elderly men and women to recall as many details as possible from two stories they were told. Following one of the stories (but not always the same one for all the participants), the men and women were instructed to relax, take a brief break and close their eyes for 10 minutes in a dark room.
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Selling More Than a Flashy Deal
The New York Times: Dozens of flash sites are now catering to niches, be it Zulily (children’s goods), One Kings Lane (home furnishings) or JackThreads (men’s wear). At the same time, a new crop of members-only sites that look just like flash sales (they send daily e-mail blasts and dangle items for a limited time in glossy virtual storefronts) has emerged. Except that these sites don’t offer deep discounts. In fact, they don’t offer discounts at all.
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Study: Awe-Inspiring Experiences Change Our Perception of Time
The Atlantic: Here's a question addressed straight to the soul (and the hippocampus): what are your most memorable moments of awe? If you're like me, those moments are a bit difficult to specify and describe. If I really put my mind to it, images of a particularly fantastic (and almost destructive) fireworks display, as well as a car ride through the mountains of Wyoming, resurface. Admittedly, awe is a tricky thing to qualify-- and for that matter, to quantify. As a subjective emotion, it's going to be felt differently by each individual, and for different reasons. What one person considers an awesome sight or experience might be met with ambivalence in another.
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Sex content in movies linked to teen sex
United Press International: Young people who watch more sexual content in movies tend to engage more than others in sexual behavior, U.S. researchers found. Ross O'Hara, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri and psychological scientists at Dartmouth College, found teens who watched more sexual content also began sexual activity at an earlier age than others. "We can't say that watching sexual content in movies is directly responsible for adolescents' sexual behavior," O'Hara said in a statement. "However, there is a correlation between the two.
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How helping others can put more hours into your day by making you feel like you have more spare time
Daily Mail: If you're always feeling there aren't enough hours in the day, the answer could be to do a favour for someone else, say scientists. Despite the fact it involves giving up some of that precious time, devoting a few hours or even just minutes to others can make us feel as if we actually have more free time, a study claims. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of 'chillaxing', or wasting time, and giving time – for example, writing a letter to a sick child. They found that those who did the latter felt they had more time on their hands, reports the journal Psychological Science.
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When We Forget to Remember – Failures in Prospective Memory Range From Annoying to Lethal
A surgical team closes an abdominal incision, successfully completing a difficult operation. Weeks later, the patient comes into the ER complaining of abdominal pain and an X-ray reveals that one of the forceps used in the operation was left inside the patient. Why would highly skilled professionals forget to perform a simple task they have executed without difficulty thousands of times before? These kinds of oversights occur in professions as diverse as aviation and computer programming, but research from psychological science reveals that these lapses may not reflect carelessness or lack of skill but failures of prospective memory.
