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Why Gamers Can’t Stop Playing First-Person Shooters
The New Yorker: In the fall of 1992, a twentysomething college dropout and former juvenile offender named John Carmack was hard at work in Mesquite, Texas, on a new concept for a video game. It would merge the first-person perspective of a game like Myst with the direct combat of the shooter game Wolfenstein 3-D and the multi-player capacity of Spectre, and it would do so in a more realistic three-dimensional environment than any game before it. The following year, Carmack and his five colleagues at id Software released the product of that vision: Doom. They knew that they were on to something big.
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Is Your Teen a Night Owl? That Could Explain His Poor Grades
TIME: Staying up late is almost a rite of passage for teens, but night owl students could be paying the price with lower grades years after high school. There’s plenty of research showing that the sleep-wake cycle of adolescents is about two hours behind that of pre-pubescent children, which means they are more likely to wake up later in the morning and go to bed later at night. And that also means they’re not well-timed with the school clock, either. But newly published research reveals that this mismatch may have lasting implications that dog high schoolers into their college years.
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Our Pupils Adjust as We Imagine Bright and Dark Scenes
Conjuring up a visual image in the mind -- like a sunny day or a night sky -- has a corresponding effect on the size of our pupils, as if we were actually seeing the image, according to new research. These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that the size of our pupils is not simply a mechanistic response, but one that also adjusts to a subjective sense of brightness. “Visual imagery is a private and subjective experience which is not accompanied by strongly felt or visible physiological changes,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo.
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Why Countries Invest Differently In Environmental Issues
NPR: Across the world, countries make very different investments in the environment. We're not just talking about measures to combat global climate change. We're talking about investments in clean water, forests, biodiversity. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam joins us regularly to share interesting new research, and he's here to tell us about an unexpected factor that seems to influence environmental stewardships. Shankar, welcome back. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: So, what's the unexpected factor that surprises you, here? VEDANTAM: Well, the X factor appears to be the age of the country, David.
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Apathetic Boredom, Fifth Type Of Boredom, Identified By Researchers
The Huffington Post: Not all boredom is the same, according to a new study. A team of researchers from Canada, the United States and Europe have identified a type of boredom, called apathetic boredom, that involves the unpleasant feelings of learned helplessness and bears similarities to depression. Apathetic boredom is now the fifth type of boredom identified by researchers, who had detailed four other types of boredom in past studies. The types of boredom are differentiated both by a person's level of mental arousal -- ranging from fidgety to calm -- and by the positivity or negativity associated with that boredom.
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The Difference Between Republican and Democratic Brains
National Journal: What Democrats and Republicans don't have in common goes far beyond the ballot box. Their personalities, like their core beliefs and policy ideas, are fundamentally different. Liberals are creative and curious, and tend to be more open to new experiences, while conservatives are more anxious, dislike change, and appreciate order in their lives. Scientists don't know if political interests shape temperament, or vice versa, but new research suggests lawmakers' personality traits play an important role in political causes—like forcing a government shutdown—and may even determine if those causes survive.
