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“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”
What do those words evoke for you? For me, because I still have fragments of T.S. Eliot’s poetry bouncing around my neurons, those lyrical words trigger the idea of growing old, with all its associated aches and pains and slowing down. Other words might do the same for you—Florida, lonely, RV, Social Security—depending on your experiences. Mere words have the power to shape our thinking and our judgments in hidden ways every day. And not just our thinking—our actions as well.
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How Everyday Ergonomics Shape Your Behavior
Fast Company: One of Darwin's greatest insights came at the end of his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it," he wrote. Darwin simply meant that emotion and expression cut both ways: you can thrust out your chest because you feel proud, or you can feel proud because you thrust out your chest. Modern science has confirmed the wisdom of this perception time and again. People feel happier when their facial muscles are positioned into a smile. And they feel sadder when they're made to hunch over.
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Making Memories, One Lie at a Time
Slate: How certain are you that your memories are real? That question drives the research of Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at University of California, Irvine. Loftus has devoted her career to the study of memory: How it’s formed, how it’s stored, how it can be altered—and how it can be fabricated. And her findings might surprise anyone who’s convinced that their memories are infallible. After receiving her Ph.D., Loftus was awarded a grant from the Department of Transportation to study car accidents.
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Droit dans les yeux (Straight in the eye)
Le Monde: Regarder son interlocuteur – ou son interlocutrice – fixement, droit dans les yeux, est souvent très efficace pour faire du charme. Mais la technique est à bannir pour négocier, s'attirer les faveurs, professionnelles s'entend, d'un éventuel futur partenaire ou client. Un brillant dirigeant, qui voulait récemment me convaincre de la pertinence de ses projets, me regardait ainsi. Il était visiblement persuadé qu'il pourrait mieux m'influencer en insistant pour capter mon regard. Une idée fort répandue. "Regarde-moi quand j'te parle !", dit ainsi le parent à l'enfant, ou le supérieur, contrôlant mal ses nerfs, à son subordonné perdu dans la contemplation de ses pieds.
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There’s one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t
Quartz: “I’m just not a math person.” We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability. Is math ability genetic? Sure, to some degree. Terence Tao, UCLA’s famous virtuoso mathematician, publishes dozens of papers in top journals every year, and is sought out by researchers around the world to help with the hardest parts of their theories.
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The Heritability of Intelligence: Not What You Think
Scientific American: One of the longest standing assumptions about the nature of human intelligence has just been seriously challenged. According to the traditional “investment” theory, intelligence can be classified into two main categories: fluid and crystallized. Differences in fluid intelligence are thought to reflect novel, on-the-spot reasoning, whereas differences in crystallized intelligence are thought to reflect previously acquired knowledge and skills. According to this theory, crystallized intelligence develops through the investment of fluid intelligence in a particular body of knowledge. ...
