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‘Brain Training’ May Boost Working Memory, But Not Intelligence
While brain training programs might strengthen your ability to hold information in mind, they probably won’t benefit the kind of intelligence that helps you reason and solve problems.
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Studying The Science Behind Child Prodigies
NPR: Matt Haimovitz is 42 and a world-renowned cellist. He rushed into the classical music scene at age 10 after Itzhak Perlman, the famed violinist, heard him play. "By the time I was 12, 13 years old I was on the road playing with Israel Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic and some of the great orchestras. So it was pretty meteoric," Haimovitz says. "I grew up with a lot of classical music in the household. My mother is a pianist and took me to many concerts." But nothing in his family history explains where Haimovitz got his extraordinary talent. And that's typical, Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College who has studied prodigies, tells NPR's David Greene.
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How ‘impermanence’ can help us all get along
The Boston Globe: We are born colorblind—literally. Newborn color vision is limited, lacking many of the visual distinctions that characterize mature sight. Soon enough, though, color takes over, figuratively as well as physiologically: We learn to see ourselves and others as parts of particular groups. Are we black or white? Male or female? What’s our religion, our language, our preference in music or food? Each time a child hears a description of a person or witnesses a human interaction, it contributes to the formation of her identity and sense of her role in the world. ...
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The Two Faces of Shame
The Huffington Post: Twenty-four-year-old Shawn Gementera was caught red-handed pilfering letters from private mailboxes along San Francisco's Fulton Street. Mail theft is a serious crime, and it was not Gementera's first run-in with the law. Even so, the judge opted for a lenient sentence -- just two months in jail and three years of supervised release. But the supervised release came with an unusual condition. Gementera's sentence required him to stand in front of a San Francisco post office, wearing a sandwich board with these words in large letters: "I stole mail.
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Sense and Superstition
The New York Times: Superstitious people do all sorts of puzzling things. But it’s not just the superstitious who knock on wood. From time to time, we all rap our knuckles on a nearby table if we happen to let fate-tempting words slip out. “The cancer is in remission, knock on wood,” we might say. In fact, it’s so common we often don’t think about it. But it’s worth asking: why do people who do not believe that knocking on wood has an effect on the world often do it anyway? Because it works. ... That makes sense intuitively. What’s less intuitive is how a simple physical act, like knocking on wood, can alleviate that concern.
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On the Political Fringes, Feelings of Superiority Abound
Ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum are equally likely to believe their opinions are superior to others’, but their feelings of superiority emerge for distinct political issues.
