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Musical Skill Reflects Working Memory Capacity in Addition to Practice Time
Practice will help you play piano better – but it's not going to turn you into Liberace. A new study looks at the role that working memory capacity plays in piano players' ability to sight read a new piece of music, an important and complex skill for musicians. Scientists have debated the role of practice in developing expertise for over a century. Genius used to be thought of as coming from inherited ability. Now many researchers think practice is the key. In 2007, researchers proposed that it takes a decade of intense practice to become an expert. Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and David Z.
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Predicting Relationship Breakups With a Word-Association Task
Here's a way to tell a romantic relationship is going to fall apart: find out what people really think about their partners. The researchers in a new study used a so-called implicit task, which shows how people automatically respond to words – in this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings. Most research on relationship success has focused on how the people in the relationship feel about each other. And this is usually done by the obvious route: asking them. "But the difficulty with that is, that assumes that they know themselves how happy they are, and that's not always the case," says Ronald D.
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‘To suffer is to suffer’: Analyzing the Russian national character
The 19th-century Russian scholar and war hero Boris Grushenko had this to say about human suffering: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.” Pretty heady stuff—and pretty depressing. There is no Boris Grushenko. Woody Allen fans will recognize Boris as the cowardly anti-hero of the 1975 film Love and Death, the director’s parody of Russia’s brooding national character.
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Is Your Left Hand More Motivated Than Your Right?
Motivation doesn't have to be conscious; your brain can decide how much it wants something without input from your conscious mind. Now a new study shows that both halves of your brain don't even have to agree. Motivation can happen in one side of the brain at a time. Psychologists used to think that motivation was a conscious process. You know you want something, so you try to get it. But a few years ago, Mathias Pessiglione, of the Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, and his colleagues showed that motivation could be subconscious; when people saw subliminal pictures of a reward, even if they didn't know what they'd seen, they would try harder for a bigger reward.
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Goalkeeping with an ancient mind
Behavioral economist Ofer Azar did an intriguing study of premier soccer goalies a few years ago, worth dusting off for the World Cup. Azar, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, studied penalty kicks. A penalty kick is awarded after a foul, and is often used as a tie-breaker in championship games. A designated player stands 36 feet from the goal, which measures 24 feet side to side. Only the opposing goalie stands between the kicker and the goal, so it’s a high probability shot. In fact, with the typical penalty kick flying at more than 60 miles per hour, the goalie has only a fraction of a second to respond.
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Reading the Look of Love
How fast you can judge whether a person of the opposite sex is looking at you depends on how masculine or feminine they look, according to a new study. The researchers speculate that there may be an evolutionary advantage to quickly noticing when a hottie is looking at you. Psychologists have debated how we determine whether someone else is looking at us or not. One point of view is that "it's almost a geometric problem," says Benedict C. Jones, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland – that people just look at the whites of the eyes and other features of the face, without being influenced by the face in general.
