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Why Does That Conductor Look So Creepy?
Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans. For example, the lifeless faces in Polar Express made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn’t get it quite right. “There’s something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College. Humans can see faces in anything—the moon, a piece of toast, two dots and a line for a nose—but we are much more discriminating when it comes to deciding what’s alive and what’s not.
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Is Violence Declining? APS Fellow Steven Pinker Says “Yes”
Violence is as an inherent part of human society. So if you looked at the number of violent deaths from prehistory to the present day, you would expect to see a pretty steady trend, right? Not so, says APS Fellow Steven Pinker. “Violence has been in decline for thousands of years,” he says. “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” Pinker, who is a psychological scientist from Harvard University, collected his research on the subject in a new book called The Better Angels of Our Nature. He discussed the book in a recent lecture at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington DC.
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A World Series to Remember?
It’s a moment burned into the minds of Red Sox and Yankee fans alike – sitting inches away from the television, fists clenched, tightness in the chest and the unbearable urge to look away… It might have been that very moment in 2003 when the Yankee’s Aaron Boone hit a game ending home run. Or it might have been that very moment in 2004, when Boston’s Pokey Reese threw to first base for the last Yankee out, and the devastation of 2003 began to fade from the memories of so many Red Sox fans. Either way, a new study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says it is the games our teams win that we remember, not the games our teams lose.
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Mentoring Programs – How Effective Are They?
Whether it’s parents, teachers, coaches, or family friends, there’s no question that adults serve as powerful role models for youth as they transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Mentoring programs across the United States have tried to harness the power of positive role models in the hopes that relationships with an adult mentor will help to support kids’ socioemotional and cognitive development. But are mentoring programs effective? And do all programs have equally positive effects?
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It pays to forget, new study claims
Toronto Sun: Just forget it. New research published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science claims that if you forget pointless facts you have a better memory for important things. Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says that "we need to realize that under some conditions (forgetting) actually does play an important role in the function of memory. “Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm said in a statement.
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A Hearing Aid That Cuts Out All the Clatter
The New York Times: After he lost much of his hearing last year at age 57, the composer Richard Einhorn despaired of ever really enjoying a concert or musical again. Even using special headsets supplied by the Metropolitan Opera and Broadway theaters, he found himself frustrated by the sound quality, static and interference. Then, in June, he went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, where his “Voice of Light” oratorio had once been performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, for a performance of the musical “Wicked.” There were no special headphones. This time, the words and music were transmitted to a wireless receiver in Mr.
