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Does nature play a role in forming prejudices?
The Boston Globe: Anyone who’s ever been to a playground or read “Lord of the Flies” knows that children don’t have to be taught how to pick on unpopular peers. But a troubling new study in the journal Psychological Science offers evidence that the impulse to hurt those who are different shows up even in children too young to speak. In a study involving 200 babies, researchers at Yale and the University of British Columbia first demonstrated that babies were far more likely to favor a rabbit puppet that preferred the same food they did. Then they broadened the experiment by introducing two dog puppets — a “helper” dog that was nice to the rabbits, and a “harmer” dog that was mean.
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The ‘New’ Benefits Of Mindfulness: Improved Memory, Focus, And GRE Scores
Forbes: Paying attention may be one of the most fundamental and important cognitive abilities we have. It’s too bad, then, that many of us are so bad at it. It’s not only our outer distractions that get the better of us – email, texts, Twitter – but even worse can be the internal ones: Mind-wandering is a major problem for a lot of people, and there are few effective solutions for it. A wandering mind can lead to a host of negative effects, from reduced productivity to rumination to cycles of negative thoughts. And like a wandering mind at work, a wandering mind at school – or, worse, during major tests like the GREs – can be a particular problem.
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Reframing Stress: Stage Fright Can Be Your Friend
Scientists find that simply encouraging people to reframe the signs of stress before public speaking was a surprisingly effective way of handling stage fright.
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Is the Placebo Effect Dangerous?
The Huffington Post: Physician and medical gadfly Ben Goldacre is well known for his relentless crusade to keep medical researchers and drug makers honest -- and improve healing in the process. His recent and popular TEDTalk focuses on a particular form of research misconduct that strikes at the core of all evidence-based treatment -- the failure to publish negative findings. This publication "bias" is not subtle or inadvertent in most cases; indeed the opposite. The deliberate non-reporting of results unfavorable to a drug's reputation is often motivated by greed, and can be lethal to patients.
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Yesterday came suddenly
The Economist: IN “TIME’S Arrow”, a novel by Martin Amis, the protagonist experiences time backwards. Eating involves regurgitating food into his mouth, sculpting the mush with his tongue, packaging it up and selling it to a grocery store. The passage on defecation is best left undescribed. Such a comic device would once leave physicists cold. They used to think that time does not have a direction, at least at the subatomic level, though they now agree that it does. Ordinary people, of course, have always known this. Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past.
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10 Things We Know About Autism That We Didn’t Know a Year Ago
The Huffington Post: Just two decades ago, autism was a mysterious and somewhat obscure disorder, commonly associated with the movie Rain Man and savantism. It affected an estimated 1 in 5,000 children. How times have changed. Today, thanks to awareness and advocacy efforts, people now have a much better understanding of autism. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now estimates that a staggering 1 in 88 children, including 1 in 54 boys, in the United States has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Another recent federal report presented data that autism prevalence among school-aged children, as reported by parents, is 1 in 50.
