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Brain Repurposes Itself to Learn Scientific Concepts
The human brain was initially used for basic survival tasks, such as staying safe and hunting and gathering. Yet, 200,000 years later the same human brain is able to learn abstract concepts, like momentum, energy and gravity, which have only been formally defined in the last few centuries. New research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, investigates how the brain is able to acquire brand new types of ideas. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Robert Mason and Marcel Just, used neural decoding techniques developed at CMU to identify specific physics concepts that advanced students recalled when prompted.
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Study Busts Some Myths about Millennials
Science is revealing that the negative stereotypes about the generation born between 1980 and 2000 are inaccurate.
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You Have More Influence Over People Than You Think
Cosmopolitan: Do you hesitate to ask people for favors simply because you assume they'll say no? A new study suggests others are far more likely to do your bidding than you probably think. For 10 years, psychologist, Vanessa K. Bohns, Ph.D., and colleagues from Cornell University asked hundreds of participants in multiple studies to pose random requests to over 14,000 strangers. (Among them: "Can I borrow your phone?" "Will you lie for more?" and, "Would you sponsor me in a race?") ... Why, then, does just saying what you want still seem so ominous?
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Why this Wharton wunderkind wants leaders to replace their intuition with evidence
The Washington Post: It’s just hours before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, but Adam Grant is talking about baseball. More specifically, he’s talking about a psychology study that discovered the most frequent base stealers tend to be younger siblings. “I hate this evidence as a card-carrying firstborn,” he told the crowd sipping cocktails at author Daniel Pink’s Cleveland Park home in Washington, there to mark the release of Grant’s book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.” But the study shows it’s probably true, Grant says. “A younger sibling is more than 10 times as likely to try and succeed at stealing a base.” ...
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Infants’ Brain Activity Shows Signs of Social Thinking
An innovative collaboration between neuroscientists and developmental psychologists that investigated how infants' brains process other people's action provides evidence directly linking neural responses from the motor system to overt social behavior in infants. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study involved thirty-six 7-month-old infants, who were each tested while wearing a cap that used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity. During the experiment, each infant observed an actor reach for one of two toys. Immediately after, the baby was allowed to select one of the same toys.
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Who’s ‘They’?
The New York Times Magazine: We are witnessing a great explosion in the way that human beings are allowed to express their gender identities. We are also hearing a lot of awkward conversations. What are we supposed to ... call everyone? A recent scene on HBO’s “Girls” riffed on this problem, drawing a linguistic fault line down a Brooklyn street. On one side is a no-frills coffee joint run by Ray Ploshansky, the show’s resident grumpy old man. (He’s, like, 38.) Across the street, a hip new cafe springs up and instantly hoovers up Ray’s clientele. When Ray crosses the road to eyeball the competition, he encounters a barista he can’t quite size up.
