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Spacing out for a bit can boost your memory
msnbc: Next time you zone out when your girlfriend is talking to you, just tell her you wanted to remember what she was saying longer. Wakeful resting--or zoning out--after learning something new can boost your memory, according to a study published in Psychological Science. In the study, researchers told two short stories to 33 people. After one story, the participants sat in a room with their eyes closed. After the second story, they played a computer game. Seven days later, the people who zoned out were able to recall more of the story details. After learning something new, your brain automatically replays the information to form a new memory.
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Does Wisdom Really Come with Age? It Depends on the Culture
“Wisdom comes with winters,” Oscar Wilde once said. And it’s certainly comforting to think that aging benefits the mind, if not the body. But do we really get wiser as time passes? There are many way to define what exactly wisdom is, but previous literature suggests that having wisdom means that you are also good at resolving conflict. But conflict is not handled the same way across cultures. Americans have been shown to emphasize individuality and solve conflict in a direct manner, such as by using direct persuasion.
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Having Heart: Can We Rethink Life’s Stresses?
Imagine that you are at the top of a ski slope, about to make a run. It’s a challenging slope, black diamond—steep and narrow, lots of trees. Plus it’s windy, and there’s that treacherous drop-off on the right. You’re an inexperienced skier, not a novice but not at all confident that you belong in such extreme terrain. Your heart is pounding and your gut is tight. Now imagine that you’re on top of the very same slope, but you are a skilled downhill racer, an Olympic contender. You’re sure you know how to attack this slope—you’ve done it many times before—but even so, your heart is pounding and butterflies are fluttering in your gut.
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Having to Make Quick Decisions Helps Witnesses Identify the Bad Guy in a Lineup
Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects. Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses’ confidence judgments.
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4 Telltale Signs of a Liar
Forbes: Nonverbal cues occur in what is called a “gesture cluster” – a group of movements, postures and actions that reinforce a common point. Trying to decipher body language from a single gesture is like trying to find narrative meaning in a single word. However, when words appear in sentences or gestures come in clusters, their meaning becomes clearer. For example, if you’re talking with someone who begins fidgeting, it may not mean much by itself. But if that person is also reducing eye contact and pointing his feet toward the door, there’s a very good chance that he’s finished with the conversation and wants to leave.
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Penny for your magical thoughts
Times Higher Education: We can't resist investing in karma and bargaining with fate, say researchers. Matthew Reisz reports Anyone awaiting the results of a job application, a court case, a medical test - or even a submission to the research excellence framework - knows what it's like for important decisions to be completely beyond their control. But to cope with this uncertainty, we tend to "invest in karma" by, for example, dropping a few coins in a collection box as if we believed that "the universe punishes sin and rewards virtue".
