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Multitask Masters
The New Yorker: In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone.
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Bonnes notes (Good Notes)
LeMonde: Je sortais d'une conférence cahier et stylo à la main, quand une nouvelle réconfortante s'est affichée sur l'écran de mon téléphone « intelligent ». Selon Pam Mueller et Daniel Oppenheimer, respectivement chercheurs en psychologie à l'université de Princeton (New Jersey) et à l'université de Californie, le papier et le crayon ne sont pas du tout ringards. Ils s'avèrent même mieux adaptés pour prendre des notes et les mémoriser. Inutile donc de culpabiliser face aux collègues, à la frappe véloce, qui saisissent plus de données en pianotant sur les claviers de leurs tablettes ou ordinateurs ultralégers. Read the whole story: LeMonde
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Daydreaming—You Are Doing It Wrong. How To Make Your Fantasies More Productive
Fast Company: Daydreaming often gets a bad rap. In a world focused on being as efficient and productive as possible, distracted mind wandering seems like a blatant waste of time. Fantasies alone can actually be de-motivating. If you dream of an ideal future, you experience some of the pleasure of having that future just because you’re dreaming about it. It is hard to be too motivated to work to change yourself when you are already feeling good about your life. But fantasies about the future (say, your dream job) can be motivating if you use them in the right way. Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues at NYU have been studying the role of fantasies in goal achievement for decades.
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Throwback Thursday: The Psychology Behind its Success
CNN: FORTUNE -- I archive dive almost every Thursday, searching for the perfect photograph: a shot from one of college's many Ugly Sweater parties; my best friend and I, 20 pounds lighter, grinning at prom; my sisters and I huddled together in 1996, our matching bowl cuts perfectly aligned. With a little help from the slight aging powers of the Valencia filter, my picture-perfect memories are posted to Instagram -- never without the beloved #tbt hashtag. I'm far from Instagram's only wistful user. To date, more than 228 million photos have been tagged with a "Throwback Thursday" hashtag -- either #tbt or #throwbackthursday -- indicating the use of a crowd-pleasing photo from days gone by.
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Apps Intended to Speed Up Reading Rate May Reduce Comprehension
The Washington Post: Readers of this space learned a few weeks ago about Spritz, an app that promises to dramatically increase your reading speed by converting text to a fast-moving sequence of individual words or phrases. Because the text is moving, your eyeballs don’t have to, so you get through words faster. Such speed-reading apps have been getting a lot of attention, but a newstudy published in the journal Psychological Science warns of a downside: You may read faster but learn less.
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Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)
The Atlantic: The idea of the emblem is obvious: This is an illustration of a trophy with an abstract soccer ball on top. The colors—green, yellow, and blue—mirror the host country's flag. Now consider this tweet from copywriter Holly Brockwell, which got 2,400 thousand retweets: "CANNOT UNSEE: the Brazil 2014 logo has been criticised for 'looking like a facepalm.'" ... I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo.
