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Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity
The New York Times: A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science. ... The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents.
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Of polar bears and consciousness: A tribute to Daniel Wegner
Scientific American: Last Friday, July 5, the psychology community lost one of its greatest minds, Daniel Wegner. It’s hard to overstate his influence on psychology as a whole — and on individual students and researchers (myself included) along the way. Just last week, I came across a new study that bears his clear imprint: the effect of suppressing your craving for cigarettes on the value you place on smoking. The more you suppress, the higher the value you assign to smoking. Wegner would have approved. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a piece about the origins of Wegner’s famed white bear — the one you can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard you try.
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Human Emotions Explained In 60 Short Interviews
NPR: In some sense we're all experts in emotion. We experience emotion every day, all the time. We constantly observe the emotional responses of others, and we often make decisions based on anticipated emotions: we pursue something because we think it will make us happy, or avoid something because we worry it will anger someone else. Despite living intimately with emotion, there's a lot we don't know. Sometimes we're baffled by our own emotional responses, or those of others. Sometimes we wish we could change our emotions, but don't know how. ...
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A point no one has (apparently) made before
The Washington Post: One of the great intellectual pleasures is to hear an idea that not only seems right, but that strikes you as so terribly obvious (now that you’ve heard it) you’re in disbelief that no one has ever made the point before. I tasted that pleasure this week, courtesy of a paper by Walter Boot and colleagues (2013). The paper concerned the adequacy of control groups in intervention studies–interventions like (but not limited to) “brain games” meant to improve cognition, and the playing of video games, thought to improve certain aspects of perception and attention. To appreciate the point made in this paper, consider what a control group is supposed to be and do.
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Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death!
The New York Times: Right now, six people are living in a nearly windowless, white geodesic dome on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. They sleep in tiny rooms, use no more than eight minutes of shower time a week and subsist on a diet of freeze-dried, canned or preserved food. When they go outside, they exit through a mock air lock, clad head to toe in simulated spacesuits. The dome’s occupants are playing a serious version of the game of pretend -- what if we lived on Mars?
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Why Teens Are So Self-Conscious
The Huffington Post: It's not teens' fault they're so worried about what others think about them: Their brains just might be that way, according to a small new study. Researchers from Harvard University found that adolescents not only felt more embarrassed, but also had a peak of activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (a brain region that is known for developing later in life), as well as higher connectivity between this brain region and another region called the striatum, when they were put through a test where they were made to feel like they were being watched and socially evaluated.
