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The Power of Precise Predictions
The New York Times: IS there a solution to this country’s polarized politics? Consider the debate over the nuclear deal with Iran, which was one of the nastiest foreign policy fights in recent memory. There was apocalyptic rhetoric, multimillion-dollar lobbying on both sides and a near-party-line Senate vote. But in another respect, the dispute was hardly unique: Like all policy debates, it was, at its core, a contest between competing predictions. Opponents of the deal predicted that the agreement would not prevent Iran from getting the bomb, would put Israel at greater risk and would further destabilize the region.
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THE SCIENCE OF WHEN YOU NEED IN-PERSON COMMUNICATION
Fast Company: In the debate over whether people should work in the office, or remotely, the in-the-office folks have one good point. A lot of things happen when we interact face-to-face that don’t necessarily happen virtually. Human beings had little ability to communicate with those who weren’t physically close to them until the past century, and our brains don’t evolve as rapidly as technology. Fortunately, understanding the science of what happens when people interact in person helps us see what’s best done that way, and when virtual meetings are fine. ...
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Look Who’s Talking
Slate: It can be startling when you first hear it: otherwise reasonable friends spouting their dogs' inner monologues, as if it’s only natural for them to speak out loud. Is that food stop choking me I need that food, the strange voice might say. I am a dog give me that OK thanks look a tree. ... “The first thing people do is treat their pets like people, so a precondition is that they perceive minds in their pets,” said Kurt Gray, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Unhappy Triad: Pain, Sleep Complaints, and Internalizing Symptoms Erin Koffel, Erin E. Krebs, Paul A. Arbisi, Christopher R. Erbes, and Melissa A. Polusny Chronic pain, sleep complaints, and anxiety/depression are three significant sources of distress that incur great personal and societal costs. Two competing theories describing the relationships among these factors suggest that internalizing symptoms mediate the relationship between sleep complaints and pain or that pain mediates the relationship between sleep complaints and internalizing symptoms.
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Free your eyes from the shackles of the shutter
The Boston Globe: MASSACHUSETTS NATIVE PAUL Theroux has roamed the world for decades, visiting countless countries and drawing on his experiences in dozens of published novels, short stories, and volumes of travel writing. He has been everywhere, or as close to everywhere as one man can manage in a peripatetic career. What Theroux doesn’t know about how to travel probably isn’t worth knowing. Here’s one lesson he has gleaned from a lifetime of roving: The best traveling is done without a camera. ... Having thousands of images on your cellphone doesn’t mean you’re remembering more.
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Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says
The New York Times: Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday. Their analysis is the first effort to account for unpublished tests of such therapies. Treatments like cognitive behavior therapy and interpersonal therapy are indeed effective, the analysis found, but about 25 percent less so than previously thought. Doctors have long known that journal articles exaggerate the benefits of antidepressant drugs by about the same amount, and partly for the same reason — a publication bias in favor of encouraging findings.
