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The Morality of Meditation
The New York Times: MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity. ...
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Diet or Exercise: Which Matters More for Weight Loss?
Women's Health: You know you should exercise and eat healthfully to keep your weight in check. The thing is, research suggests that when people devote time to one healthy habit, they spend less time on the other. So which is more important if you're worried about your waistline: your workout or your diet? Turns out, people who think that diet is the most important factor in weight control tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than those who believe that exercise is the key, according to six new studies published in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Women's Health
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Feeling Stressed? Then You May Become More Helpful
TIME: How did your friend get you to babysit her kids for the weekend, or your sister talk you into hosting the next book club meeting? They probably asked when you were anxious about a work project or stressed about making an impending mortgage payment. Stress, however, isn’t traditionally associated with altruism. When self-discipline wanes, such as when you are hurried, hungry or distracted, you are less likely to be helpful to strangers (if you’re late for an appointment, you’re probably not stopping to help the person who just dropped the contents of his briefcase).
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The Suicide Detective
The New York Times: For reasons that have eluded people forever, many of us seem bent on our own destruction. Recently more human beings have been dying by suicide annually than by murder and warfare combined. Despite the progress made by science, medicine and mental-health care in the 20th century — the sequencing of our genome, the advent of antidepressants, the reconsidering of asylums and lobotomies — nothing has been able to drive down the suicide rate in the general population. ...
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Is Free Will Just an Illusion?
NPR Science Friday: What would it mean to live in a world in which people are simply mechanical devices responding to natural laws beyond their control, bobbing like corks in a sea of causes? If determinism is true, then the consequences are profound. First, we would need to radically overhaul our conception of moral responsibility. After all, if the choice you make in a given situation is preordained—is the only choice you can make—then what are we to do about blame? Absent the capacity to choose, according to a school of thought called hard determinism, there cannot be any blame. And if no one can be blamed, no one is morally deserving of punishment.
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Warum sich Frauen Gesichter besser merken (Why do women remember faces better)
ORF Austria: "Die Art und Weise, wie unser Blick über Gesichter streift, beeinflusst unsere Fähigkeit, jemanden wiederzuerkennen", sagt Jennifer Heisz von der McMaster University in Kanada. Sie hat soeben Frauen und Männern Bilder von Gesichtern am Computer präsentiert und ihre Reaktionen per Eye-Tracking-Technologie verglichen. Wie Heisz im Fachblatt "Psychological Science" schreibt, blicken Frauen offenbar mehr auf neue Gesichter als Männer es tun und sie nehmen auch mehr Details wahr - allerdings ohne es zu wissen: "Menschen sind sich in der Regel nicht bewusst, wo sie ihren Blick fixieren." Read the whole story: ORF Austria
