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The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less
The New York Times: Diets don’t just reduce weight, they can reduce mental capacity. In other words, dieting can make you dumber. Understanding why this is the case can illuminate a range of experiences, including something as far removed from voluntary calorie restriction as the ordeal of outright poverty. Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve processed only half of what has been said. Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: “Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it.
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The Two Faces of Shame
Twenty-four year old Shawn Gementera was caught red-handed pilfering letters from private mailboxes along San Francisco’s Fulton Street. Mail theft is a serious crime, and it was not Gementera’s first run-in with the law. Even so, the judge opted for a lenient sentence—just two months in jail and three years of supervised release. But the supervised release came with an unusual condition. Gementera’s sentence required him to stand in front of a San Francisco post office, wearing a sandwich board with these words in large letters: “I stole mail.
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Think Fast to Stay ‘Up’
You wake up. Your phone blinks. You touch the screen, slide your finger, and chills shiver down your spine. “See me tomorrow,” says the email your boss sent at midnight. Your thoughts accelerate. “What does she want? Why did she write so late? Am I in trouble? The company is in trouble. This down economy! I’m getting fired. Why me? Where will I work? I have skills. There are other companies. I have no skills. Where will I apply? Can we move? How will the kids react to changing schools? I can do this. We can do this. No matter what.” We think. It helps us. Errands, plans, and goals require thought. Synapses fire. Action potentials race down axons.
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The science of introverts and the workplace
The Washington Post: In the years since Susan Cain published “Quiet,” several other bestselling business authors have joined her effort to weed from that genre the “extrovert ideal”—the bold, outspoken personality type that many self-help books idolize. That ideal, Cain says, took root in organizations in the 20th century and has since hurt the way we identify leaders, award promotions and even structure our meetings. Cain spoke with Lillian Cunningham, editor of the Post’s On Leadership section, about what it would look like to cultivate the assets that introverts bring to the workplace. ...
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Older Workers Should Think Young
The Wall Street Journal: At age 42, Shona Sabnis is one of the "older" workers in the New York office of public-relations firm Edelman. Though she prides herself on being able to get along with most people, she is sometimes puzzled by the actions of her 20-something co-workers who, in turn, don't understand why the senior vice president of public affairs likes to distribute physical newspaper clippings. While dealing with a situation at the office, Ms. Sabnis was told by a junior co-worker that she should be handling her client differently. It wasn't phrased as a suggestion, which surprised her since she knew the co-worker wasn't that familiar with the account.
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Poker pros’ arms betray their hands
ScienceNews: No bluff: In high-stakes matches, a poker face may not be good enough. Players may have to develop “poker arms” as well. When shown two-second video clips of the arms and hands of top players making bets in the World Series of Poker, college students did well at judging who was playing a strong hand and who wasn’t, say psychology graduate student Michael Slepian of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and his colleagues. But when viewing videos of only poker pros’ upper bodies or faces during bets, students couldn’t correctly predict whether players held good or bad cards, the researchers report Sept. 12 in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: ScienceNews
