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Wellbeing: Meditation as Medicine
The Arlington Connection: In her dimly lit basement in Great Falls, Mary Beth Kogod sounds a meditation bell that echoes through the room. The 12 people sitting on cushions in a circle around her close their eyes and listen to the gentle sounds of her voice. “If your mind begins to wander, gently guide it back to the sound of my voice,” said Kogod, as she leads the group in a mindfulness meditation session. ... A 2011 study by the Association for Psychological Science showed that meditation can be effective in boosting memory and concentration. Settings for this mind-body practice now range from workplaces to classrooms. Read the whole story: The Arlington Connection
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Your Hands May Reveal the Struggle to Maintain Self-Control
Watching people’s hands as they choose between long-term and short-term options offers a new approach to studying self-control.
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Systematic Research Investigates Effects of Money on Thinking, Behavior
Three experiments provide inconsistent evidence for the effect of money primes on various measures of self-sufficient thinking and behavior.
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Degrees of Maybe: How We Can All Make Better Predictions
NPR: Turn on the TV, and you'll find no shortage of people who claim to know what's going to happen: who's going to get picked for the NBA draft, who will win the next election, which stocks will go up or down. These pundits and prognosticators all have an air of certainty. And why shouldn't they? We, as the audience, like to hear the world's complexity distilled into simple, pithy accounts. It doesn't help that these commentators rarely pay a serious price when their predictions don't pan out. Read the whole story: NPR
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Forgot Where You Parked? Good
The New York Times: School’s out for the summer — and so begins a long few months of parents’ and teachers’ worrying about all the things their children will forget before the fall. The fractions they won’t be able to multiply. The state capitals they won’t be able to identify. “Learning loss” is the name for it. Forgetting is supposed to be the antithesis of learning, and whether we’re a kid or an adult, most of us are plainly embarrassed if we can’t recall a name or fact. But it turns out that forgetting can help us gain expertise, and when we relearn something we couldn’t recall, we often develop a richer form of understanding. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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WATCH: Ben Folds and a surgeon show what happens when music enters the brain
Stat: Earlier this month, Limb joined Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra in an off-the-cuff demonstration of musical creativity and how it comes about in Ben Folds’s brain. STAT then sat down with Folds and Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician, to talk about how Folds thinks about the music that he makes. Read the whole story: Stat
