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How Your Brain Remembers Where You Parked The Car
NPR: If you run into an old friend at the train station, your brain will probably form a memory of the experience. And that memory will forever link the person you saw with the place where you saw him. For the first time, researchers have been able to see that sort of link being created in people's brains, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neuron. The process involves neurons in one area of the brain that change their behavior as soon as someone associates a particular person with a specific place.
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Car dashboards that act like smart phones raise safety issues
Reuters: When it comes to dashboard displays that are more like smart phones, two things are clear: Customers want them, and automakers are intent on supplying them. But are they really a good idea? Car companies answer with an emphatic yes. They say outsized dashboard displays that behave more like smart phones will boost revenue and attract buyers. And they also insist the new screens will make driving less dangerous, because of well-integrated voice controls and large touch screens that will keep drivers from fumbling with more dangerous mobile phones. But the increasingly elaborate screens have also sparked a broad debate about how much technology is appropriate in a car.
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The Work We Do While We Sleep
The New Yorker: It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we’re sleeping, we’re vulnerable—and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive. In a 1719 sermon, “Vigilius, or, The Awakener,” Cotton Mather called an excess of sleep “sinful” and lamented that we often sleep when we should be working. Benjamin Franklin echoed the sentiment in “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” when he quipped that “there’ll be sleeping enough in the grave.” For a long time, sleep’s apparent uselessness amused even the scientists who studied it. The Harvard sleep researcher Robert Stickgold has recalled his former collaborator J.
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Kids of Helicopter Parents Are Sputtering Out
Slate: Academically overbearing parents are doing great harm. So says Bill Deresiewicz in his groundbreaking 2014 manifesto Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
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New Windshield Displays May Unleash an Invisible Gorilla
Several companies are already investing in new technology aimed at deterring distracted driving by projecting graphics from a cellphone—text messages, weather, collision warnings—directly onto a driver’s field of view on the windshield. Proponents of this technology argue that it will increase road safety by providing drivers with useful information without having to take their eyes off the road. Rather than glancing down at a cellphone to read a text or check the map, directions and messages will appear directly in the driver’s line of sight.
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Treating Trauma With ‘Tetris’
Pacific Standard: Memory reconsolidation—the method that involves re-exposing a patient to a past memory and then updating it while in this allegedly malleable state—has potentially major implications for people who suffer from PTSD flashbacks. But proposed methods for implementation haven't been so sensitive to traumatized individuals. Clinical trials for propranolol have seen mixed results, and electro-convulsive therapy could potentially re-traumatize the very people it's trying to treat. But now, research appears to have landed on an effective, even enjoyable, reconsolidation regimen—playing Tetris.
