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How the Brains of ‘Super-Multitaskers’ Are Different
New York Magazine: Multitasking, we’ve been told constantly in recent years, is something human beings aren’t naturally good at. Even though technology has given us more opportunities than ever before to, say, work while checking in on an NBA score, or have a conversation while sending a text message, such multitasking works against the human brain’s natural strengths. When you try to do more than one thing at once, there’s an inevitable hit to your performance on all the tasks involved. That’s because it takes cognitive energy to switch between tasks — as I put it in 99U’s book on productivity, there is really no such thing as multitasking — there is only task-switching.
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The Neurology of Lending
The Huffington Post: Back in 1976 a young professor in Bangladesh starting making dubious low-interest loans to the rural poor of his country. Muhammad Yunus had the crazy idea that even impoverished farmers -- men and women without credit history or collateral or even steady employment -- could be disciplined and trustworthy in repaying small loans, and he founded the Grameen Bank to finance that vision. Many banks eventually followed Grameen's lead, despite some serious misgivings, and "microfinance" is now a huge global enterprise. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million men and women held microloans totaling $38 billion, and Grameen claims a repayment rate between 95 and 98 percent.
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Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here’s how it changes your brain
The Washington Post: Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain. She explains: Q: Why did you start looking at meditation and mindfulness and the brain? Lazar: A friend and I were training for the Boston marathon. I had some running injuries, so I saw a physical therapist who told me to stop running and just stretch. So I started practicing yoga as a form of physical therapy.
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A Key Researcher Says ‘Grit’ Isn’t Ready For High-Stakes Measures
NPR: If you've followed education in the news or at the book store in the past couple of years, chances are you've heard of "grit." It's often defined as the ability to persevere when times get tough, or to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal. Alongside growth mindset and self-control, grit is on a short list of not-strictly-academic skills, habits and qualities that researchers have deemed essential. And that research has quickly made its way into the hands of educational leaders eager to impose accountability measures that can go farther than standardized math and reading tests.
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A ‘Learning’ Attitude Helps Boost Job Search Success
For most jobseekers, the job hunt is no picnic -- disappointment, rejection, and desperation seem to have become hallmarks of the typical job search. It’s common to hear stories of job hunters who have submitted hundreds of applications before getting a single interview. No one will argue that looking for a new job isn’t stressful, but new research finds that the way people manage and channel this stress could have a big impact on their ultimate success.
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Do You See What I See?
The Economist: HUMAN beings are not born with the knowledge that others possess minds with different contents. Children develop such a “theory of mind” gradually, and even adults have it only imperfectly. But a study by Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman at the University of Chicago,published in Psychological Science, finds that bilingual children, and also those simply exposed to another language on a regular basis, have an edge at the business of getting inside others’ minds. In a simple experiment, Dr Fan and Dr Liberman sat monolingual, bilingual and “exposure” children aged between four and six with a grid of objects placed between them and an experimenter.
