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Five myths about love
The Washington Post: Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is...detectable on an fMRI scan? Poets have written about love for millennia, but only recently has it become a subject of serious scientific pursuit. Psychologists, biologists, economists and anthropologists are all investigating the role of love in our lives and our culture. The poets, it turns out, have gotten a lot right (for example, the metaphor of love as a kind of madness gained credence when one study found a chemical resemblance between romantic love and obsessive-compulsive disorder ). But we still have a lot to learn. Maybe love will always be part myth, but it’s worth debunking a few of our more outdated ideas. ...
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Who’s right? Who’s left?
The Boston Globe: THE LEFT-VERSUS-RIGHT labeling in our political discourse is so ingrained in our minds that our sense of political differences can be undermined by switching sides — literally. In October 2012, researchers asked people to rapidly identify whether a picture was of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. One set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Obama and the right hand to press the “P” key for Romney; another set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Romney and the right hand to press the “P” key for Obama. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Driving May Help Prevent Cognitive Decline
Driving a car is one of the most cognitively complex tasks we engage in on a daily basis. Driving requires an assortment of cognitive skills including executive functioning, information processing, visual processing, and memory. As
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A Cluttered Kitchen Can Nudge Us To Overeat, Study Finds
NPR: Hunger is not the only reason we eat sweets. Often we eat as a way to celebrate, or sometimes we reach for food when we're sad or bored. And a study published this month in the journal Environment and Behavior points to another factor that can nudge us to eat: clutter. "The notion that places — such as cluttered offices or disorganized homes — can be modified to help us control our food intake is becoming an important solution in helping us become more slim by design," report Brian Wansink of Cornell University and his colleagues in their write-up of the study. ... So, how might these findings translate to a messy desk? After all, many of us do a lot of snacking at the office.
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Research Hints at Promise and Difficulty of Helping People With A.D.H.D. Learn
The New York Times: Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists have found that small alterations in how people study can accelerate and deepen learning, improving retention and comprehension in a range of subjects, including math, science and foreign languages. The findings come almost entirely from controlled laboratory experiments of individual students, but they are reliable enough that software developers, government-backed researchers and various other innovators are racing to bring them to classrooms, boardrooms, academies — every real-world constituency, it seems, except one that could benefit most: people with learning disabilities. ... “If anything, for the A.D.H.D.
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Why we never really get over that first love
The Washington Post: Twenty years ago . . . She was my first relationship . . . My first boyfriend . . . I was 17 . . . She was 19 . . . We were crazy about each other . . . We broke up because . . . So much time has passed . . . I find myself thinking of her . . . He keeps appearing in my dreams . . . I’m happily married . . . I’m happily married, BUT . . . I can’t help but wonder . . . We recently reconnected . . . I know I need to move on . . . Please, help . . . What should I do? If you spend enough time reading advice columns, you notice a pattern. In the stream of sorrows and quandaries and relationship angst, one word bubbles up again and again. First. My first love. My first time.
