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How Brain Scientists Forgot That Brains Have Owners
The Atlantic: It’s a good time to be interested in the brain. Neuroscientists can now turn neurons on or off with just a flash of light, allowing them to manipulate the behavior of animals with exceptional precision. They can turn brains transparent and seed them with glowing molecules to divine their structure. They can record the activity of huge numbers of neurons at once. And those are just the tools that currently exist. In 2013, Barack Obama launched the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—a $115 million plan to develop even better technologies for understanding the enigmatic gray blobs that sit inside our skulls.
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This Psychologist Is Figuring Out How Your Brain Makes Emotions
New York Magazine: The “classical view” of emotion — a bundle of ideas dating back to the ancient Greeks — says that emotions are best described as something that happen to you. In this line of thinking, emotions are the antagonist of cool, calculated intellect; each emotion has a particular “center” in your brain and “expression” on your face.
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How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory
Nature: Strange things have been happening in the news lately. Already this year, members of US President Donald Trump's administration have alluded to a 'Bowling Green massacre' and terror attacks in Sweden and Atlanta, Georgia, that never happened. The misinformation was swiftly corrected, but some historical myths have proved difficult to erase. Since at least 2010, for example, an online community has shared the apparently unshakeable recollection of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he lived until 2013, leaving prison in 1990 and going on to serve as South Africa's first black president. Read the whole story: Nature
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Know Thyself
Sacramento Magazine: HOW WELL DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN PERSONALITY? And how do others perceive you? These are the kinds of weighty questions that Dr. Simine Vazire and her colleagues investigate at the Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab at UC Davis, where she is the director. We talked recently with Vazire, an associate professor in the department of psychology, to learn more about how research is conducted at the lab, whether we are good judges of our own personality traits, and why people who know they are arrogant keep behaving that way. How do you research people’s perception of their own personality?
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Why We Believe Obvious Untruths
The New York Times: How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right. Plenty of liberals believe, counter to scientific consensus, that G.M.O.s are poisonous, and that vaccines cause autism. The situation is vexing because it seems so easy to solve. The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right?
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No evidence to back idea of learning styles
The Guardian: There is widespread interest among teachers in the use of neuroscientific research findings in educational practice. However, there are also misconceptions and myths that are supposedly based on sound neuroscience that are prevalent in our schools. We wish to draw attention to this problem by focusing on an educational practice supposedly based on neuroscience that lacks sufficient evidence and so we believe should not be promoted or supported. Generally known as “learning styles”, it is the belief that individuals can benefit from receiving information in their preferred format, based on a self-report questionnaire.
