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Your Complicated Amygdala: Why Brain-Imaging Work Is Misleading
The Atlantic: Brain-imaging studies have been painting an overly-simplistic picture of the how the brain works. It has even filtered into TV programming. In one episode of a popular legal drama, a character claimed to have figured out that a policeman was racist because his amygdala activated whenever he was shown pictures of black people, demonstrating his fear of them. This simplified picture troubles many cognitive researchers, including Dr. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University. It's true that the amygdala becomes increasingly active when people are afraid, but that's far from the whole story.
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How will your personality change as you age?
Business Insider: People show increased self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age." Recent longitudinal and cross-sectional aging research has shown that personality traits continue to change in adulthood. In this article, we review the evidence for mean-level change in personality traits, as well as for individual differences in change across the life span. In terms of mean-level change, people show increased self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age. These changes predominate in young adulthood (age 20–40).
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Problem Solving in a Doggy Age
San Francisco Chronicle: Allow me to quote from the first paragraph of an article on the site Science Daily: "Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. 'There's a classic obstacle to innovation called "functional fixedness," which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts.
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The Risks of ‘Racy’ Thinking
I worked in the news business for many years, and sometimes the pace could get hectic. But the work day didn’t really charge up until mid-morning. In the early morning hours, my routine was to leaf through several of the day’s newspapers, including the sports section, usually with my feet up on my desk. Occasionally I would check the AP ticker or turn on the TV, but not until after I had spent some time with the papers and my morning coffee. This was back in the 20th century, of course, and looking back that pace seems almost leisurely by today’s standards. Technology has radically altered the way that many of us consume information.
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Just 60 Seconds of Combat Impairs Memory
Just 60 seconds of all-out physical exertion in a threatening situation can seriously damage the memories of those involved for many details of the incident, according to a new study of police officers. Police officers, witnesses and victims of crime suffer loss of memory, recognition and awareness of their environment if they have had to use bursts of physical energy in a combative encounter, according to scientists.
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What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy
The New York Times: Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking.
