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Oscar psychology: Why celebrities fascinate us
Today: From the Oscar's red carpet to the tabloids lining supermarket checkout lines, celebrity obsession is everywhere. Even the most casual moviegoer might find him or herself flipping through a slideshow of Academy Award fashion after the big event. So why do we fixate on celebrities? In most cases, it's perfectly natural. Humans are social creatures, psychologists say, and we evolved — and still live — in an environment where it paid to pay attention to the people at the top. Celebrity fascination may be an outgrowth of this tendency, nourished by the media and technology. Read the whole story: Today
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Movies Tuned to Our Brains
The Wall Street Journal: Three seconds is just too long. If this sentence were a Web page and it took that long to finish loading, you'd give up and go get a pizza. In 2000, sure, we'd hang around for eight seconds before clicking away. Now we're done at three. So how, then, are we still able to sit quietly in darkened theaters watching movies that routinely run more than two hours? Since 1928, winners of the Academy Award for best picture have averaged 140 minutes. The longer the luckier, people say. Of this year's nine nominees, just three are under two hours. All must meet stringent criteria to get nominated, of course.
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Nature Has A Good Beat, But Can You Dance To It?
NPR: Rhythm in music is about timing — when notes start and stop. And now scientists say they've found a curious pattern that's common to musical rhythm. It's a pattern also found in nature. Let's consider now some new research on rhythm. Rhythm in music is about timing - when notes start and stop. What makes for that swing? Scientists say they've found a curious pattern that's common to musical rhythm, and it's a pattern also found in nature. NPR's Christopher Joyce has the story. Psychologist Daniel Levitin plays the saxophone. Lately, though, he's been feeding musical scores into a computer - 558 musical scores, in fact, spanning four centuries. And he found a pattern in their rhythms.
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Can playing World of Warcraft make you smarter?
Los Angeles Times: World of Warcraft, the world's most popular multiplayer role-playing game, can definitely help you kill time, but can it also make your brain work better if you are of relatively advanced age? That was the suspicion of Anne McLaughlin and Jason Allaire, psychology professors at North Carolina State University. They run the Gains Through Gaming Lab, which examines how the playing of video games improves cognitive ability in older adults. To test their theory, the researchers asked 39 adults ages 60 to 77 to play World of Warcraft for roughly two hours a day over a two-week period.
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When Truisms Are True
The New York Times: What ignites the engine of creativity? A popular metaphor in American business urges you to think “outside the box.” Folk wisdom advises that problem-solving is helped by thinking about something “on the one hand” and then “on the other hand.” Is there any psychological truth to such metaphors for better thinking? Our research suggests that the answer is yes. When people literally — that is, physically — embody these metaphors, they generate more creative ideas for solving problems. Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call “embodied cognition” indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body.
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Rx for happiness: Tax the rich?
msn: Discussions about taxes tend to cause otherwise reasonable people to go from zero to apoplexy in 3.5 seconds. So I groaned inwardly when my editor suggested I write about a study of 54 countries showing that the more progressive a nation's tax system, the happier its citizens are. Oh, great. I thought. I could see the headline: Soak the rich and you'll feel better. Then I read the study, which also concluded happiness was not enhanced by higher government spending. In fact, bigger government outlays were associated with less happiness. Which made me feel better about this assignment. At least the study was an equal opportunity offender. Read the whole story: msn
