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The Creativity of the Wandering Mind
Pacific Standard: Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering? Well, congratulations: without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your mind won’t, by itself, lead to creative thinking.
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Can You Train Business School Students To Be Ethical?
Slate: A few years ago, Israeli game theorist Ariel Rubinstein got the idea of examining how the tools of economic science affected the judgment and empathy of his undergraduate students at Tel Aviv University. He made each student the CEO of a struggling hypothetical company, and tasked them with deciding how many employees to lay off. Some students were given an algebraic equation that expressed profits as a function of the number of employees on the payroll. Others were given a table listing the number of employees in one column and corresponding profits in the other.
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Can You Learn While You’re Asleep?
NPR: If you're a student, you may have harbored the fantasy of learning lessons while you sleep. Who wouldn't want to stick on a pair of headphones, grab some shut-eye with a lesson about, say, Chinese history playing in his ears — and wake up with newly acquired knowledge of the Ming Dynasty? Sadly, it doesn't work. The history lesson either keeps you from going to sleep, or it doesn't — in which case you don't learn it. But researchers may have taken the first baby step to making the fantasy come true: In an unusual experiment published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers Anat Arzi, Ilana Hairston and others showed that people are capable of learning simple lessons while fast asleep.
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Do SAT Scores Help or Hurt in Decisions About Who Will Do Well in College?
Every year, nervous high school juniors and seniors, clutching #2 pencils and armed with hours of test preparation, sit down and take the SAT. At their most basic, these tests focus on verbal, math, and writing ability, and performance on these tests has been linked to subsequent academic performance. As a result, college admissions teams use SAT scores along with other information, such as high school grades, in choosing their incoming freshman classes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the SAT has been the subject of much scrutiny.
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Brain finds pleasure in processing abstract art
The Irish Times: A new discipline called neuroaesthetics was founded about 10 years ago by Semir Zeki of University College London. It aims to discover the neurological basis for the success of artistic techniques. Most people find the blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings appealing and the new studies show that these images stimulate the amygdala, the area in the brain geared to detect threats in our peripheral vision. The amygdala plays a big role in our emotions, which may explain why we find Impressionist paintings so moving. The images in abstract paintings do not directly picture anything in the real physical world.
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Wisdom is matter of culture
Zee News: Do we really get wiser with age or does culture shape wisdom? Having wisdom implies that one is also good at resolving conflict. But conflict is not handled the same way across cultures. Americans are known to emphasize individuality and solve conflict in a direct manner. Conversely, the Japanese place a greater emphasis on social cohesion, and tend to settle conflict indirectly, relying on mediation through another person. Psychological scientist Igor Grossmann of the University of Waterloo, Canada and his colleagues investigated how the resolution of conflict and, by extension, wisdom, differs between Japanese and American cultures, the journal "Psychological Science" reports.
