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Brain Scientist: How Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’ Gets One Thing Deeply Wrong
Wbur: Pixar’s “Inside Out” is the latest in a long tradition of animated entertainment that teaches us about science. Chemistry, as I learned from Saturday morning cartoons, is about mixing colorful, bubbling liquids in test tubes until they explode. “Roadrunner and Coyote” cartoons—those fine nature documentaries—taught me physics: If you run off a cliff, you’ll hang in mid-air until the unfortunate moment that you look down. Computer science is apparently about robots that kill you. And now, with “Inside Out,” we finally have cartoon neuroscience. Your brain, it turns out, is populated with characters for each emotion, and they press buttons to control your expressions.
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How to Maximize Your Vacation Happiness
New York Magazine: The sad thing about vacations is that they end. However much fun you’re having at the beach or carving down a ski mountain or at your sustainable carbon-neutral ecolodge in the rainforest, the specter of your trip home and the resumption of normal day-to-day annoyances is always right there. And as Jennifer Senior pointed out last year, there is indeed a fair amount of research showing that shortly after you return from a vacation, your happiness level bounces back to where it was beforehand.
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How can you be happier in everyday life?
TODAY: Is happiness sustainable in day-to-day life? One psychologist says yes, and staged a social experiment to put her theory to the test. NBC reports. Watch the whole story: TODAY
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How traumatized Air Transat passengers are helping brain research
CTV News: Brain scans of passengers who believed they were about to die when their plane ran out of fuel over the Atlantic in 2001 are helping researchers better understand traumatic memories. Air Transat Flight 236, bound for Lisbon from Toronto on Aug. 24, 2001, crash-landed in the Azores after gliding powerless over the ocean for 30 minutes. Some of the 306 passengers and crew on board developed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as a result of the terrifying scare.
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Addicted to Your Phone? There’s Help for That
The New York Times: LIKE pretty much everyone these days, Susan Butler stares at her smartphone too much. Unlike most everyone, she took action, buying a $195 ring from a company called Ringly, which promises to “let you put your phone away and your mind at ease.” Ringly does this by connecting its rings to a smartphone filter so that users can silence Gmail or Facebook notifications while preserving crucial alerts, like text messages from a babysitter, which cause the ring to light up or vibrate. ...
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What Are the Best and Worst Ways to Prepare for an Exam?
Scientific American: Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do, responds: So glad you asked! Scientists have a lot of practical information on this topic, but most students do not know about it. Research investigating how students learn was first conducted at highly competitive institutions such as the University of California, Los Angeles. Even students at these top schools used terrible strategies. For example, students commonly highlight what they read, but research shows that it does not help memory.
