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Montgomery County school chief starts special book club
The Washington Post: Montgomery County Superintendent Joshua P. Starr offered a glimpse of his educational philosophy, and his cerebral personality, during his first official book club gathering last week. The auditorium of the central office in Rockville was transformed into a talk show studio Tuesday for an event scheduled as part of the new superintendent’s transition plan. Starr relaxed in a leather chair. Green plants and a dark wooden bookcase were nearby. Guests sat on a sofa across from the coffee table. The featured guest — author Carol Dweck — “attended” via Skype from her study in California. A cardboard display of her book, “Mindset,” was propped up on a side table.
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Impatient people have lower credit scores
Yahoo India: Impatient people default on their mortgages, because they are more likely to chose immediate gain over a larger reward later, researchers say. 'Most often, the reasons economists put forward are, maybe there was not enough screening for mortgage applicants, or securitization, or other institutional reasons,' said economist Stephan Meier from the Columbia University. 'That's definitely important, but in the end humans make those repayment decisions. So there must be more psychological factors that explain how people make those decisions to default or not,' said Meier, the journal Psychological Science reported. Read the whole story: Yahoo India
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Doorway to Blame for Room Amnesia
Scientific American: You walk into the kitchen to grab a—wait, why did you come in here again? A new study suggests that your brain is not to blame for your confusion about what you’re doing in a new room—the doorway is. The work is in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. [Gabriel A. Radvansky, Sabine A. Krawietz, and Andrea K. Tamplin, "Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations"] University of Notre Dame researchers had subjects perform memory tasks, such as remembering the colors of blocks in different boxes. The volunteers had to do the task after walking across a room, or after walking the same distance through a doorway into a second room.
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The Amygdala As Sales Tool
The Wall Street Journal: Many are the tricks that companies use to win our business. As Martin Lindstrom reminds us in "Brandwashed," marketers make sneaky appeals to our fears and desires, leverage our social connections to maximize peer pressure, dazzle us with tinfoil celebrity and lure us with sexual come-ons that would embarrass a bawd. Mr. Lindstrom has made his living in the business he now proposes to expose. His specialty has been using the tools of brain science to help marketers press subconscious buttons. In 2009, Time magazine named him one of the world's most influential thinkers.
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Friday Illusion: Ghostly images change shape
NewScientist: Think hard: you can transform a circle into a hexagon using the power of your mind. New animations created by Hiroyuki Ito from Kyushu University show how staring at coloured shapes can produce an afterimage that varies in form as well as hue. "This is the first study to show systematic shape changes in after-images involving shape processing mechanisms in the brain," says Ito. The first version of the illusion uses solid, stationary shapes. After focusing on yellow circles, blue hexagons typically appear and vice versa. The same effect also occurs with outlines of the shapes. In another variation, hexagons and circles rotate.
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Why some people never seem to forget a face
MSN India: Face recognition is an important social skill but not many of us are equally good at it, reveals a study. Researcher Jia Liu along with colleagues from Beijing Normal University have demonstrated how this skill is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. 'Individuals who process faces more holistically - that is, as an integrated whole - are better at face recognition,' said Jia, the journal Psychological Science reported. In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also analytically - that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose, according to a university statement.
