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Our obsession with mindfulness is based on limited scientific evidence
Mindfulness practices are promoted at major corporations like Google, offered as psychotherapy via the National Health Service in the UK, taught to about 6,000 school children in London, and widely studied across sub-disciplines of psychological science. And yet there’s still not even a consistent scientific definition of “mindfulness.” It gets worse. A paper published on Oct. 10 in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science argues that mindfulness research to date has been wrought by significant conceptual and methodological problems. For all the excitement about mindfulness meditation in contemporary culture, evidence of its benefits is limited.
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Elizabeth Loftus: How Can Our Memories Be Manipulated?
Years of research have taught Elizabeth Loftus just how unreliable our memories are. From tweaking a real memory to planting a completely fabricated one, tampering with our minds is surprisingly easy.
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Want to raise an empowered girl? Then let her be funny.
Laurie Menser was a 7- or 8-year-old in Rockville, Md., when she wandered over to a neighbor’s house one day, slipped a glass eye in her mouth and got the attention of the grown-ups in the room. Then she smacked the back of her head and stuck out her tongue — waiting for laughs. “They were appalled,” she remembers. “They were like, ‘You need to go home right now and tell your dad what you did.’ ” The neighbors didn’t know that it was Menser’s father who’d picked up the fake eye at a yard sale and taught his daughter the gag.
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Why We Miss Objects That Are Right in Front of Us
Easy right? But do you see the other toothbrush in the image as well? Most people will quickly spot the toothbrush on the front of the counter, but take longer — or even fail to find — the much bigger one behind it. The oversight has to do with scale. People have a tendency to miss objects when their size is inconsistent with their surroundings, according to a recent study in Current Biology. This is just the latest in a robust body of research that reveals how expectations dramatically affect our ability to notice what’s around us. Though the image above was provided by the authors of the study to illuminate their point, the study was set up slightly differently.
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Why Introverts Shy Away From Leadership
Introverted people don’t expect to enjoy being in charge — but research suggests these predictions are often wrong.
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What every teacher should know about … memory
The Guardian: There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students – but academic studies of this kind aren’t always easy to access, or to translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that, by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers. No one study or journal can provide a definitive answer, but they can help offer some guidance. Some of the studies I will choose in these articles are iconic, some quirky, some are large scale, and some have a small sample size. But all of them look to help answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school?
