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Some people can ‘see’ in total darkness, study says
USA Today: At least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light, according to a new study. Kevin Dieter, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, devised experiments to study the phenomenon. How does Dieter explain the finding? "What we normally perceive of as sight is really as much a function of our brains as our eyes," said Dieter, echoing the study's claim published in the journal Psychological Science. The idea for the study came from cognitive science professors Duje Tadin of Rochester University and Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt, who stumbled upon the occurrence while devising experiments for an unrelated study.
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Why There Are No Atheists at the Grand Canyon
TIME: Any fool can feel religious around the holidays. When the entire Judeo-Christian world is lit up — literally — with celebrations of faith, family and love, you’ve got to be awfully short of wonder not to experience at least a glimmer of spirituality. The rest of the year? It can be a little harder. But as generations of campers, sailors, hikers and explorers could attest, there’s nothing quite like nature — with its ability to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe — to make you contemplate the idea of a higher power.
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Creativity can last well into old age, as long as creators stay open to new ideas
The Washington Post: Doris Lessing, the freewheeling Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism who died Sunday at age 94, was prolific for most of her life. But five years ago, she said the writing had dried up. “Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever,” she said, according to one obituary. “Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.” ... “Large creative breakthroughs are more likely to occur with younger scientists and mathematicians, and with lyric poets, than with individuals who create longer forms,” said Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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10 Things We’ve Learned About Taste
Smithsonian Magazine: Tomorrow, most Americans will say they are grateful for many things–except, chances are, they will forget an important one, taken for granted. I’m talking about our sense of taste, a faculty more nuanced than sight or hearing or touch, and one that’s become sadly under appreciated as eating has turned into just another thing we multi-task. But this is a holiday during which the sense is celebrated, if only for a few hours. We savor flavors again, slow down enough to remember there are actually five distinct tastes we experience–sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, or meaty–instead of one indefinable gulp of bland.
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Are We Happier When We Have More Options?
NPR: Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. Listen to the story: NPR
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On the Face of It: The Psychology of Electability
The New Yorker: Few people knew that the country’s thirty-second President was paralyzed. Most knew that he’d had polio, but they remained unaware that he could not walk. Franklin Delano Roosevelt managed to hide the extent of his condition from the majority of the voting public with a simulated walking technique and a moratorium on photography of him in motion or in a wheelchair. His successor, Harry S. Truman, followed an opposite approach to publicity: for his first election campaign, he completed a train tour that covered some twenty-two thousand miles. At each stop, he would make sure that voters got a good, long look at him.
