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Thinking Out of the Box: How Physical Experience Enhances Creativity
Huffington Post: When Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg was working on his 1977 hit movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," he spent long hours puzzling over the artistic texture of the film, trying to get just the right feel. Late one night, he decided to put his work aside and take a drive to clear his head. He headed up Hollywood Hill to one of the vistas overlooking Los Angeles and -- impulsively, for no reason at all -- he did a hand-stand on the roof of his car. With his perspective on the illuminated LA cityscape turned topsy-turvy, he "saw" what would become the alien visitors' spacecraft. This Hollywood legend may be apocryphal, but creativity gurus love it anyway.
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Thinking won’t help you resist temptation
Yahoo: Temptation comes in many guises -- for a dieter, it's a sweet treat; for an alcoholic, a drink; for a married man, an attractive woman. How to defeat the impulse to gratify desire and stick to your long-term goals of slimness, sobriety, or fidelity? Don't stop and think. Thinking may not help. That is the surprising conclusion of a new study conducted by Loran Nordgren and Eileen Chou at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the journal Psychological Science reported. Nordgren and Chou wanted to make sense of two contradictory bodies of literature.
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The 2011 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize: Honoring Dr. Brenda Milner for her pioneering work in cognitive neuroscience
Scientific American: Tragic it is when a young mother never gets to meet her newborn child; however, it is also awe-inspiring to see a victim of this circumstance rise above and honor his mother’s sacrifice. On December 11th, 1925, the complications surrounding Paul Greengard’s birth resulted in the death of his mother, nee Pearl Meister. Almost 75 years later, the Nobel laureate and Rockefeller University professor and his wife, Ursula von Rydingsvard, paid homage to his late mother – and to women in science – by launching the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. This year’s recipient is Dr. Brenda Milner, the Dorothy J.
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Curiosity Doesn’t Kill The Student
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's good for the student. That's the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school. Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it's not the whole story. Everyone knows a brilliant kid who failed school, or someone with mediocre smarts who made up for it with hard work.
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Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study?
The Wall Street Journal: Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers. Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Is It True Smiling Improves Your Mood?
The Wall Street Journal: Is it true smiling improves your mood? We tackled that question as part of our “Is It True?” video series here at the Health Blog — you can see the video below. We found a wealth of information on smiling and how it can boost positive emotions. Neuropsychologist Jodi Deluca gives us a brief overview of how the body responds to smiling and laughter, while George Bonanno, author of “The Other Side of Sadness,” talks about the benefits of a spontaneous joy-filled smile. Researchers who have studied the “facial-feedback hypothesis,” which originated with Charles Darwin, say smiling can intensify a person’s pleasure.
