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How traumatized Air Transat passengers are helping brain research
CTV News: Brain scans of passengers who believed they were about to die when their plane ran out of fuel over the Atlantic in 2001 are helping researchers better understand traumatic memories. Air Transat Flight 236, bound for Lisbon from Toronto on Aug. 24, 2001, crash-landed in the Azores after gliding powerless over the ocean for 30 minutes. Some of the 306 passengers and crew on board developed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as a result of the terrifying scare.
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Addicted to Your Phone? There’s Help for That
The New York Times: LIKE pretty much everyone these days, Susan Butler stares at her smartphone too much. Unlike most everyone, she took action, buying a $195 ring from a company called Ringly, which promises to “let you put your phone away and your mind at ease.” Ringly does this by connecting its rings to a smartphone filter so that users can silence Gmail or Facebook notifications while preserving crucial alerts, like text messages from a babysitter, which cause the ring to light up or vibrate. ...
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What Are the Best and Worst Ways to Prepare for an Exam?
Scientific American: Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do, responds: So glad you asked! Scientists have a lot of practical information on this topic, but most students do not know about it. Research investigating how students learn was first conducted at highly competitive institutions such as the University of California, Los Angeles. Even students at these top schools used terrible strategies. For example, students commonly highlight what they read, but research shows that it does not help memory.
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Pursue Happiness, But in Moderation
The New York Times: // // Legend has it that Icarus, on his famous ersatz feathered wings, refused to heed his father’s injunction to “fly the middle course” and not too near to the sun, and consequently saw his wings melt before he fell into the sea. Avoiding extremes — both surfeit and deficiency — is a wisdom preached by Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas and many other thinkers and writers. The prescription applies to working too hard versus too little, parenting by decree versus neglect and pursuing happiness too earnestly versus not at all.
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The Walking Dead
The New Yorker: id you get enough sleep last night? Are you feeling fully awake, like your brightest, smartest, and most capable self? This, unfortunately, is a pipe dream for the majority of Americans. “Most of us are operating at suboptimal levels basically always,” the Harvard neurologist and sleep medicine physician Josna Adusumilli told me. Fifty to seventy million Americans, Adusumilli says, have chronic sleep disorders. In a series of conversations with sleep scientists this May, facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship, I learned that the consequences of lack of sleep are severe.
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A Conversation With the Psychologist Behind ‘Inside Out’
Pacific Standard: Pixar has a proud tradition of taking things that are incapable of expressing human emotion—robots, toys, rats, cars—and imagining a world where they can, in fact, feel. The studio's most recent effort, the box-office topping and critically acclaimed Inside Out, takes viewers inside the head of a young girl named Riley, imagining what it would be like if her feelings could feel. While Inside Out is ultimately an animated children's movie, the perfectionists at Pixar (which is owned by the Walt Disney Company) still took the task of personifying emotions very seriously.
