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These Are the Best Songs to Wake Up to in the Morning According to a Psychologist
TIME: Music streaming service Spotify is here to help us make our lives easier. Step one: get out of bed, thanks to the right tunes. Spotify partnered with psychology PhD candidate David M. Greenberg to put together the perfect playlist for waking up in the morning. The 20-song list kicks off with Coldplay’s uplifting “Viva La Vida,” and also includes timeless jams like Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day,” and the very literal “Wake Me Up” by Avicii. The secret to getting you out of bed, according to the service? Read the whole story: TIME
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Why all the practice in the world can’t turn you into an Olympian
The Washington Post: Practice makes perfect. It’s a mantra we hear all our lives, from simple refrains in kindergarten to the more nuanced versions that populate self-help books. It’s everywhere at this year’s Olympic Games in Rio, as athletes credit the long hours they spent working with coaches and trainers for their success. It leads us to believe there’s a chance that each of us could be an Olympian, a concert pianist, or an expert computer programmer — if only we put the work in. In popular culture, this idea was probably best publicized as Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-hour rule,” which says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at any skill.
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Babies’ Spatial Reasoning Predicts Later Math Skills
Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, according to findings from a longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We’ve provided the earliest documented evidence for a relationship between spatial reasoning and math ability,” says Emory University psychological scientist Stella Lourenco, whose lab conducted the research. “We’ve shown that spatial reasoning beginning early in life, as young as six months of age, predicts both the continuity of this ability and mathematical development.” Emory graduate student Jillian Lauer is co-author of the study.
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Olympic Victory And Defeat, Frame By Frame
NPR: It may sound trite, but the Olympic Games truly are a chance to witness what unites us all as human beings: Our joy in triumph and our anguish in defeat. David Matsumoto believes this truism, but on an entirely different level. Matsumoto is a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and a former Olympic judo coach. He has analyzed the behavior of Olympic athletes. He spoke recently with Shankar Vedantam about what his research reveals. Read the whole story: NPR
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What Teens Need Most From Their Parents
The Wall Street Journal: The teenage years can be mystifying for parents. Sensible children turn scatter-brained or start having wild mood swings. Formerly level-headed adolescents ride in cars with dangerous drivers or take other foolish risks. A flood of new research offers explanations for some of these mysteries. Brain imaging adds another kind of data that can help test hypotheses and corroborate teens’ own accounts of their behavior and emotions. Dozens of recent multiyear studies have traced adolescent development through time, rather than comparing sets of adolescents at a single point. ... The ability to make and keep good friends is especially useful at this stage.
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Toronto’s Poop-Themed Restaurant Defies Human Psychology
New York Magazine: There are plenty of things in this world that I think are cute, but that doesn’t mean I want to eat them. Kittens — snuggly, sure. Tasty? I really don’t want to find out. Ditto for baby elephants. And, for that matter, baby humans. I even think that big-eyed poop emoji is kind of adorable, in a weird way; I also do not feel, nor have I ever felt, the urge to go make myself a crap sandwich. ... There are many reasons why the whole concept feels like a terrible idea, and one of them is this: When it comes to disgust, humans are not rational beings.
