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Michael Gazzaniga: “Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain”
The Diane Rehm Show: Recent research in neuroscience suggests that much of what we do is hard wired.It’s tempting to believe that further research will eventually demonstrate that physical properties of the brain fully control the human mind. But neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues we already have enough data to conclude that human behavior is not fully predetermined. He claims that a sense of responsibility, for instance, derives not from within a single brain, but from social interaction. Please join us for a conversation with Michael Gazzaniga on the concept of free will and the science of the brain. Listen to the broadcast: The Diane Rehm Show
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La depresión antes o después del embarazo afecta el desarrollo del bebé
AOL Latino: Un nuevo estudio ha demostrado que los bebés pueden percibir lo que sus madres están sintiendo y que pueden verse afectas por el estado sicológico de su progenitora tanto antes como después de dar a luz. Según reportara el Huffington Post, la investigación, realizada por la Universidad de California en Irvine y publicada en la edición de diciembre de Psychological Science, examina cómo la depresión materna impacta a la salud mental del bebé y sus habilidades motoras. Investigadores monitorearon a 221 mujer embarazados durante un año completo para observar de cerca el proceso.
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Human Nature’s Pathologist
The New York Times: Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.” At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ” This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct.
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Hand Washing: A Deadly Dilemma
New Yorker essayist Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a prestigious teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A couple years ago, he wrote a profile of his hospital’s infection-control team, whose full-time job it is to control the spread of infectious disease in the hospital. The focus of the piece was hand washing—or more accurately, the team’s failed efforts to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands. They tried everything. They repositioned sinks, and had new, automated ones installed. They bought $5000 “precaution carts” to make washing, gloving and gowning easy and efficient.
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Blame My Doorway For Senior Moments
Huffington Post: I regularly walk into my kitchen and open a drawer, only to forget what I am looking for. I walk into our laundry room to claim some clean socks, only to forget what it was I needed. When I call for the dog, my kid's name sometimes comes out of my mouth. And as much as I dislike Rick Perry, I totally got how he couldn't remember the third federal department he plans on eliminating if we elect him President. Now finally, we have something to blame for those unfortunately named "senior moments." It's the doorway. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky says that the act of passing through a doorway causes memory lapses.
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Impatient People Have Lower Credit Scores
Is there a psychological reason why people default on their mortgages? A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people with bad credit scores are more impatient – more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward later. The new paper is by two economists who were working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston at the time they did the research. People at the Fed are very interested in understanding how the default crisis came about.
