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Is ‘twin communication’ a real thing?
msnbc: When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart? The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post. But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.
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Pregnancy May Change Mom’s Brain For Good
LiveScience: Time in the womb is obviously important for the development of the fetal brain. But pregnancy is also a time for changes in Mom's brain — changes that may prepare women to become better mothers. These changes still are little-understood, concludes a review published in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Pregnant women often complain about "pregnancy brain" or "mommy brain," a memory fog that seems to produce lost car keys and misplaced cell phones. One 2010 study suggested that high levels of sex hormones could be to blame for the frustrating lapses in concentration.
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If a child or adult plays videogames, how does that affect IQ?
The Wall Street Journal: Recent studies linking increases in adults' cognitive performance to playing action videogames have sparked a lot of interest. People who are trained to play fast-paced, unpredictable games tend to score higher in the lab on tests of such skills as spotting a fast-moving target, tracking multiple objects and grasping visual information quickly, according to a research review published in 2008 in Psychology and Aging.
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The perils of ‘bite-size’ science
Short, fast, and frequent: Those 21st-century demands on publication have radically changed the news, politics, and culture—for the better or worse, many say. Now an article in January’s Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, aims a critique at a similar trend in psychological research. The authors, psychologists Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, call it “bite-size science”—papers based on one or a few studies and small samples. “We’re not against concision,” says Bertamini. “But there are real risks in this trend toward shorter papers.
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New Research Shows That Life’s Tough Experiences Do Make Us Stronger
Discovery Fit & Health: Often times when life hits us like a ton of bricks it leaves us saying “why me”? And after the event has passed we once again come back to the age old truth that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In fact, new research may prove this true. Research published in the current issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, has shown that life’s negative experiences do make us more resilient. While constant trauma does cause psychological problems, those who had no trauma at all also had problems. It was those somewhere in the middle, that had some traumatic events, that turned out better.
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Most people want more income equality
Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: Earlier this fall, the Journal Sentinel reported that 46% of Milwaukee's children live in poverty. More recently, the paper compared similarly sized educational systems in Wisconsin and Finland. Those Finnish kids seem to be doing very well, indeed; Wisconsin - not so good. That the number of children living in poverty in Finland is around 5% should not go unnoticed. Finland has a great deal more economic equality than we do. Yet the plans of Gov. Scott Walker and national Republicans propel us toward more inequality than we have now, already greater than anytime since the 1920s.
