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Strategic Studying Limits the Costs of Divided Attention
Multitasking impaired students’ overall memory but not their ability to identify and remember the most important material.
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Be Careful! Your Mind Makes Accidents Inevitable
The New Yorker: When Clarissa Dalloway thinks that it’s “very, very dangerous to live even one day,” what, exactly, does she have in mind? She’s probably contemplating something abstract—the passage of time, the obscurity of fate. She isn’t worried about stumbling over her own feet and careening into London traffic. Then again, she hasn’t read “Careful: A User’s Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds,” a terrifying primer on the absurd and humiliating dangers of daily life by the psychologist and safety expert Steve Casner.
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The Culture Inside
Invisibilia: Is there a part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, that we don't even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encountered it? We begin with a woman whose left hand takes instructions from a different part of her brain. It hits her, and knocks cigarettes out of her hand and makes her wonder: who is issuing the orders? Is there some other "me"in there I don't know about? We then ask this question about one of the central problems of our time: racism. Scientific research has shown that even well meaning people operate with implicit bias - stereotypes and attitudes we are not fully aware of that nonetheless shape our behavior towards people of color.
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How to Complain and Get Results
The New York Times: The blender does not blend. Your vacation was spoiled by a late flight. Or the cabinet you bought is as sturdy as wet cardboard. When products or services fail, it’s easy to feel as if your complaints to the company responsible disappear into a black hole. While there are no magic words, there are a few tricks to help your complaint get a friendlier reading. All it takes is a little finesse, and some good documentation. ... Be focused and think about what you want, Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist and a professor emerita of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, wrote in an email.
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How one researcher is studying that tingly, universal, unmistakable and unsettling phenomenon known as déjà vu
TED: Most of us know the feeling. You’re introduced to someone, you watch a new movie, or you walk down a street in an unfamiliar city, and then suddenly, you’re struck by the uncanny sensation that you’ve been through this all before. You know it’s impossible — there’s no way you could have encountered this person, film or street — yet it all seems so familiar. We call this “déjà vu,” a French phrase meaning “already seen,” first used in the early 20th century. Some researchers estimate that two-thirds of the population has experienced this phenomenon, which also may be accompanied by the conviction that you know what will happen next. Read the whole story: TED
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Familiar Faces Look Happier Than Unfamiliar Ones
People tend to perceive faces they are familiar with as looking happier than unfamiliar faces, even when the faces express the same emotion to the same degree.
