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Brains At Play
NPR: This week at NPR Ed, our series Playing To Learn will explore questions about why people play and how play relates to learning. Why do we humans like to play so much? Play sports, play tag, play the stock market, play duck, duck, goose? We love it all. And we're not the only ones. Dogs, cats, bears, even birds seem to like to play. What are we all doing? Is there a point to it all? The scientist who has perhaps done more research on brains at play than any other is a man named Jaak Panksepp. And he has developed a pretty good hypothesis. In a nutshell, he, and many others, think play is how we social animals learn the rules of being social.
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Is Musical Talent Rooted in Genes?
LiveScience: Practice doesn't always make perfect when it comes to becoming the next Mozart, a new study suggests. Researchers compared pairs of identical twins, and found that no matter how hard one twin had practiced up until that point in their life, the other twin who had practiced much less still had an equal level of ability in certain musical skills. This may be because some aspects of musical talent are built into the genes, the researchers said. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Young Children Bet on Their Numerical Skills: Metacognition in the Numerical Domain Vy A. Vo, Rosa Li, Nate Kornell, Alexandre Pouget, and Jessica F. Cantlon Although metacognition has been identified as an important factor in learning, it is still unclear how this skill emerges and develops in early childhood. Children 5 to 8 years old completed a number-discrimination task and an emotion-discrimination task. After each comparison, the children indicated the confidence they had in their answer.
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The 1 Question to Ask to Identify a Narcissist
New York Magazine: If you suspect someone in your life is a narcissist, there may be an incredibly straightforward way to confirm your suspicions: Just ask them. New research published in PLOS ONE suggests that simply asking narcissists to out themselves can be surprisingly effective. Specifically, researchers asked this question over a series of 11 studies: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist.’” The participants — and there were about 2,200 of them in total — were told to answer on a scale of one to seven.
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And the Moral of the Story Is: Keep It Positive
The New York Times: The slower pace of summer means more time to tell stories to our kids, whether it’s around a campfire or in a car on the long, long trip to our vacation spot. We tell these stories for many reasons: to entertain, to pass the time, to share adventures from our own past. And sometimes we tell stories in order to make a point. Parents, teachers, and other adults have employed moral parables for thousands of years (Aesop’s fables date to the sixth century B.C., and we’re still telling kids who are slow off the mark about the tortoise and the hare).
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The Common Cold May Be a Traffic Hazard
Fatigue is quickly becoming recognized as one of the most dangerous driving impairments. But that drowsiness is not just the product of sleep deprivation or over-exertion. Sluggishness resulting from the common cold can also hamper driving abilities. Psychologists Andrew Paul Smith and Samantha Jamson of Cardiff University wanted to investigate if individuals with a cold performed poorly on simulated driving tasks. The researchers conducted a two part, divided-attention test on 25 English college students. These volunteers were split into either a “Healthy” or “Colds” sample based on the self-assessed severity of their cold symptoms.
