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Study on Cultural Memory Confirms: Chester A. Arthur, We Hardly Knew Ye
The New York Times: Quick: Which American president served before slavery ended, John Tyler or Rutherford B. Hayes? If you need Google to get the answer, you are not alone. (It is Tyler.) Collective cultural memory — for presidents, for example — works according to the same laws as the individual kind, at least when it comes to recalling historical names and remembering them in a given order, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings suggest that leaders who are well known today, like the elder President George Bush and President Bill Clinton, will be all but lost to public memory in just a few decades.
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Why Everything You Think About Aging May Be Wrong
The Wall Street Journal: Everyone knows that as we age, our minds and bodies decline—and life inevitably becomes less satisfying and enjoyable. Everyone knows that cognitive decline is inevitable. Everyone knows that as we get older, we become less productive at work. Everyone, it seems, is wrong.
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Shop Yourself Happy
The Atlantic: This year, a few pure souls might celebrate a freegan Christmas. Some will opt for a "Buy-Nothing" holiday. Others still will pull off a DIY Hanukkah. The vast majority of people who have some disposable income, however, will do what all the glossy store catalogs implore this time of year and "SHOP NOW." Even among those who think that Black Friday insanity, and holiday consumerism in general, are terrible, the default setting during December is to buy things. Behavioral economists have been puzzling for years over how much and what kinds of spending provides the biggest happiness boost for the buyer.
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Study Shows Riding The Quiet Car Is Crushing Your Spirit
NPR: An experiment in Chicago randomly assigned train and bus riders to either talk to the stranger next to them or commute quietly. The result? Even for introverts, silence leaves you sadder. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Many of us have some way to occupy ourselves on our commute. We may sip a cup of coffee in the drink holder. We may listen to the radio. If you ride the train to work, you have other options. You can sit in solitude reading, looking at your phone or you can talk to the person next to you. So which would make you happier? NPR's Shankar Vedantam joins us each week on this program. He's here with an answer. Hi, Shankar. Read the whole story: NPR
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5 Reasons Why You Give Such Awful Presents
Time: We’ve all suffered through that awkward silence at least once, the one that comes right after someone opens the holiday gift that you selected—and that’s somehow not quite right. In fact, it’s a horrible gift. It’s inappropriate, thoughtless, silly, or otherwise ill-considered. Depending on the manners of the recipient, the reaction to the presentation of such a gift might be a forced squeal of delight, an overly broad, stiff smile, or a quick, flat “thank you” tinged with a touch of confusion. Or something far worse. But there’s no getting around the fact that, as far as presents go, this one has been deemed pretty awful. How could this have happened, you wonder?
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Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory
BBC: If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong. One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it. This is in part because of flaws in our ability to think about our own thinking, which is called metacognition. Studying this self-reflective thought process reveals that the human species has mental blind spots. One area where these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We're actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best. Read the whole story: BBC
