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Sense of Humor Changes With Age
The Atlantic: There’s an episode in the first season of The Office in which Michael Scott, the tactless boss, is asking his female employees to serve as cheerleaders for an upcoming company basketball game. When the heavyset Phyllis says she’ll do it, Michael reflexively says, “Oh yuck, that’s worse than you playing.” He then tries to rescue the crack with, “because we need you as an alternate.” According to a new study published in the journal Psychology and Aging, this type of humor is exactly the kind you should never deploy around the elderly.
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Humans use dominant hand as a constant perceptual ‘ruler’
Zee News: London: People tend to perceive their dominant hand as staying relatively the same size even when it is magnified, supporting the idea that we use our hand as a constant perceptual "ruler" to measure the world around us, says a study. This suggests that our bodies are used as perceptual metrics, meaning that we are more likely to attribute changes in the perceived size of the hand to changes in the world. Read the whole story: Zee News
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Give Yourself a Present for the Future
Pacific Standard Don’t feel like you have the time to keep a diary or bury a time capsule? You might be missing out, according to psychologists at Harvard Business School: The joy of rediscovering something even a few months old is greater than you might think. In case you weren’t aware, we’re pretty bad at predicting our future choices and emotions. Economists find over and over that we’ll choose to invest money as long as we make the choice well before we actually see the money: If you get it today, you’ll probably head for the mall. Meanwhile, we’re also fairly bad at predicting how we’ll respond emotionally to future events.
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The Difference Between Internal and External Focus, and Why It Matters
250 Words: If our Paleolithic ancestors visited 2014, they’d notice a few changes. We’re mostly agrarian. We mostly live in buildings. We spend most of our days in small spaces staring at screens. Also, there are seven billion of us—up from a few hundred thousand—and a few of them inhabit a small capsule that flies around the planet. And those tiny rectangles everyone stares at? They’re capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man, but most people use them to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.
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Bringing The Body To Digital Learning
PBS: Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: it addresses itself only to the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out. Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture, dating to Descartes and before. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies.
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Navigating Familiar Roads May Lead to Driving on “Autopilot”
For years, data on car accidents has consistently shown that drivers are most likely to crash at locations very near their homes. At first glance it might seem like this phenomenon occurs because people spend the most time driving close to home. However, a recent study suggests that it may actually due to the fact that drivers are less attentive and aware when they’re driving on familiar roads.
