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Daydreaming Can Improve Your Focus
Business Insider: Besieged at every turn by distractions, we spend a lot of time struggling to pay attention, concentrate, and focus on the task in front of us. What we don’t do, according to University of Southern California professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, is fully appreciate the value of the more diffuse mental activity that characterizes our inner lives: daydreaming, remembering, reflecting. ... Our brains have two operating systems, Immordino-Yang and her coauthors explain in a recent article published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
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Being a Lifelong Bookworm May Keep You Sharp in Old Age
Smithsonian Magazine: To keep their bodies running at peak performance, people often hit the gym, pounding away at the treadmill to strengthen muscles and build endurance. This dedication has enormous benefits—being in shape now means warding off a host of diseases when you get older. But does the brain work in the same way? That is, can doing mental exercises help your mind stay just as sharp in old age? Experts say it’s possible. As a corollary to working out, people have begun joining brain gyms to flex their mental muscles.
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Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
The Atlantic: For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners. One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. Many studies have noted the connection between a happy mind and a healthy body — the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have.
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How to Get Kids to Eat Healthy Without Breaking the Bank
LiveScience: Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children in the past 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The numbers are staggering, and it's a statistic that we can clearly see when we're out at the park or grocery store. But anyone who has ever fed their child fast food knows that it's hard to go back once kids get a taste for junk food. So, what can we do? Well, a June study in the journal Psychological Science study may give us an answer. Researchers conducted an experiment with preschool-age children to test the theory that the kids would be able to understand the concepts of good nutrition. Hold on to your seats, folks!
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. When Holding Back Helps: Suppressing Negative Emotions During Sacrifice Feels Authentic and Is Beneficial for Highly Interdependent People Bonnie M. Le and Emily A. Impett Can suppressing negative emotions help people's relationships? Participants kept a daily diary in which they noted whether they had made a sacrifice for their partner. Each time participants made a sacrifice, they completed measures of suppression and of personal and interpersonal well-being.
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Rethinking The Way We Learn
Forbes: Last summer I read Daniel Willingham’s fascinating book ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ and immediately put it on my list to blog about. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, applies the principles of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Essentially, his goal is explain to teachers how their students’ brains work. The common wisdom in education holds that memorizing facts is a waste of time. In contrast Willingham believes the more details you know about a subject, the more you can understand the subject. By memorizing, we spend less time recalling facts which frees up time to spend on learning new concepts. Read the whole story: Forbes
