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The Most Focused Kids in the World?
In her new, provocatively titled book The Smartest Kids in the World, journalist Amanda Ripley tells the story of Kim, a 15-year-old Oklahoma girl who has the good fortune to spend a year going to school in Pietarsaari, on Finland’s west coast. Kim is fortunate because she has landed quite by chance in a public school system that Ripley identifies as one of the world’s best, a model of international academic performance year in and year out. Ripley reports on Kim’s experience, and on the lives of her Finnish classmates, as she tries to identify the reasons for Finnish kids’ superior academic performance.
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Parents sinking some kids with their puffed-up praise, study finds
NBC: Moms and dads who bathe kids in exaggerated flattery to boost low self-esteem are stifling the very children they hope to elevate, a new study shows. In experiments involving groups of about 1,000 adults and 500 children, scientists found that kids who self-identified as lacking confidence shied from tough tasks after receiving hyped compliments from adults, according to the paper, to appear in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers videotaped parents, tallying how often they juiced their verbal kudos if they believed their child struggled with esteem.
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In the Human Brain, Size Really Isn’t Everything
The New York Times: There are many things that make humans a unique species, but a couple stand out. One is our mind, the other our brain. The human mind can carry out cognitive tasks that other animals cannot, like using language, envisioning the distant future and inferring what other people are thinking. The human brain is exceptional, too. At three pounds, it is gigantic relative to our body size. Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, have brains that are only a third as big. Scientists have long suspected that our big brain and powerful mind are intimately connected. Starting about three million years ago, fossils of our ancient relatives record a huge increase in brain size.
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Increase Savings with a Cyclical Mindset Towards Time
Lifehacker: Think of time as a set of cyclical experiences instead of a linear goal-oriented approach. That shift in your mindset could end up increasing your short-term personal savings, according to findings published in the journal Psychological Science. People who think about savings in linear terms may be overly optimistic, assuming they can always save more down the road. A cyclical mindset, on the other hand, encourages people to think of life as a series of interconnected recurring experiences.
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Dare to be an optimist!
The Globe and Mail: It’s easy to overdose on the news. Take too much, and you’ll swear the human race is in terminal decline. Today, we interrupt our regular programming of doom and gloom to offer you an antidote – a cheery list of ways in which the world is reported to be getting better and better, or at least not much worse. Don’t worry. Be happy for a change! The usual news cycle will resume all too soon. ... Age brings an increase in well-being, according to a study in Psychological Science, although nobody is quite sure why. Maybe it’s maturity. Maybe it’s changes in our brain chemistry. Or maybe we just don’t give a darn any more.
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Why Does Music Aid in Memorization?
The Wall Street Journal: The words to a holiday song bubble up to the surface of the brain, even decades since last hearing the tune. Yet recalling a bank-account password can put the mind in a twist. Neuroscientists have long debated the brain mechanisms related to memory, but they agree on one thing: Information set to music is among the easiest to remember. One expert, Henry L. Roediger III, professor of psychology at the Memory Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, explains how songs easily stick in the mind. The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two areas in the brain associated with memory and they process millions of pieces of information every day.
