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Clothes make the man/woman (smarter)
The Sydney Morning Herald: Say you're getting ready for an exam. You spend hours brushing up on vocabulary; you do hundreds of practice problems - those are good techniques, but you might consider adding a new trick - wearing a lab coat. People who wore white lab coats made half as many mistakes on attention-related tasks as those wearing their regular clothes, according to a study published this year by Hajo Adam, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, along with colleague Adam Galinsky. It isn't clear if the effect wears off over time, or if knowing the trick removes its effectiveness.
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Twins born on same day as their twin brothers, 4 years later
NBC: Exactly four years after a British mother gave birth to a pair of twin boys, on July 18, she delivered a second set of naturally conceived twins, according to a report Thursday in the British newspaper The Sun. The mom, Kim Hefer, is reportedly the first woman in the United Kingdom to have to two sets of twins on the same day years apart. A bookie set the odds of this happening at 30 million to one, the paper reported. That’s only the most recent case of attention-grabbing coincidental births.
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8 Amazing 60-Second Health Fixes
Prevention: "Feelings of having too much to do and not enough time to do it can exact a toll on health and wellbeing," says Melanie Rudd, PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her solution? Look at something that inspires awe. Her findings, which will appear in the journal Psychological Science, reveal that people who viewed 60-second videos that included awe-inspiring views (astronauts in space, whales breaching and gorgeous waterfalls) felt less time-crunched and less impatient afterward. Why? "Experiencing feelings of awe can alter people’s perceptions of time,” says Rudd. Read the whole story: Prevention
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Why Can Some People Recall Every Day Of Their Lives? Brain Scans Offer Clues
NPR: Six years ago, we told you about a woman, identified as A.J., who could remember the details of nearly every day of her life. At the time, researchers thought she was unique. But since then, a handful of such individuals have been identified. And now, researchers are trying to understand how their extraordinary memories work. Bob Petrella, 62, of Los Angeles had to go through a lot of memory testing to qualify as someone with superior autobiographical memory. First, there were lots of questions about news events from the past several decades, like the O.J. Simpson car chase.
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A Worksheet for Math-Phobic Parents
The Wall Street Journal: Parents who hate math often fear raising kids who will feel the same. Tammy Jolley is one of them—"a horrible math-phobic," she says. After struggling through algebra and statistics in high school and college, helping her 9-year-old son Jake with math homework makes her "feel like saying, 'Aaarghh, this is hard! I know why you don't get it,' " says the Madison, Ala., state-court official. Instead, she forces herself to encourage Jake. Ongoing research is shedding new light on the importance of math to children's success.
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Turn Off the Phone (and the Tension)
The New York Times: One recent sweltering afternoon, a friend and I trekked to a new public pool, armed with books, sunglasses and icy drinks, planning to beat the heat with a swim. But upon our arrival, we had an unwelcome surprise: no cellphones were allowed in the pool area. The ban threw me into a tailspin. I lingered by the locker where I had stashed my phone, wondering what messages, photos and updates I might already be missing. After walking to the side of the pool and reluctantly stretching out on a towel by the water, my hands ached for my phone.
