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Yes, Your Toddler Really Is Smarter Than A 5-Year-Old
NPR: Parents, does your 18-month-old seem wise beyond her years? Science says you're not fooling yourself. Very small children can reason abstractly, researchers say, and are able to infer the relationships between objects that elude older children who get caught up on the concreteness of things. In experiments at the University of California, Berkeley, children as young as 18 months were able to figure out the relationship between colored blocks. The child would watch a researcher put two blocks on top of a box. If the blocks were identical, the box would play music. The majority of children were able to figure out the pattern after they were shown it just three times.
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This president had the most ‘grandiose narcissism’
USA Today: When you're running the country, being narcissistic may come in handy. Psychologists and experts on presidential personalities have put together a list of the presidents who had the most "grandiose narcissism" — which, the Houston Chronicle explains, is characterized by a showy and extroverted personality. That's in contrast to "vulnerable narcissism," which involves being more sensitive. More than 100 authorities on various presidents assessed the leaders' traits; to judge a president's success, researchers referred to surveys of historians, Futurity reports. Our most grandiosely narcissistic president? One Lyndon Baines Johnson, the study finds. ...
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Some people can ‘see’ in total darkness, study says
USA Today: At least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light, according to a new study. Kevin Dieter, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, devised experiments to study the phenomenon. How does Dieter explain the finding? "What we normally perceive of as sight is really as much a function of our brains as our eyes," said Dieter, echoing the study's claim published in the journal Psychological Science. The idea for the study came from cognitive science professors Duje Tadin of Rochester University and Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt, who stumbled upon the occurrence while devising experiments for an unrelated study.
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Why There Are No Atheists at the Grand Canyon
TIME: Any fool can feel religious around the holidays. When the entire Judeo-Christian world is lit up — literally — with celebrations of faith, family and love, you’ve got to be awfully short of wonder not to experience at least a glimmer of spirituality. The rest of the year? It can be a little harder. But as generations of campers, sailors, hikers and explorers could attest, there’s nothing quite like nature — with its ability to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe — to make you contemplate the idea of a higher power.
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Creativity can last well into old age, as long as creators stay open to new ideas
The Washington Post: Doris Lessing, the freewheeling Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism who died Sunday at age 94, was prolific for most of her life. But five years ago, she said the writing had dried up. “Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever,” she said, according to one obituary. “Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.” ... “Large creative breakthroughs are more likely to occur with younger scientists and mathematicians, and with lyric poets, than with individuals who create longer forms,” said Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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10 Things We’ve Learned About Taste
Smithsonian Magazine: Tomorrow, most Americans will say they are grateful for many things–except, chances are, they will forget an important one, taken for granted. I’m talking about our sense of taste, a faculty more nuanced than sight or hearing or touch, and one that’s become sadly under appreciated as eating has turned into just another thing we multi-task. But this is a holiday during which the sense is celebrated, if only for a few hours. We savor flavors again, slow down enough to remember there are actually five distinct tastes we experience–sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, or meaty–instead of one indefinable gulp of bland.
