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You’ve probably been tricked by fake news and don’t know it
ScienceNews: If you spent Thanksgiving trying in vain to convince relatives that the Pope didn’t really endorse Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton didn’t sell weapons to ISIS, fake news has already weaseled its way into your brain. Those “stories” and other falsified news outperformed much of the real news on Facebook before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And on Twitter, an analysis by University of Southern California computer scientists found that nearly 20 percent of election-related tweets came from bots, computer programs posing as real people and often spouting biased or fake news. ...
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Illusion Reveals that the Brain Fills in Peripheral Vision
What we see in the periphery, just outside the direct focus of the eye, may sometimes be a visual illusion, research shows.
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The Psychological Key To Beating A Challenge
Forbes: In a famous study first conducted in 1960, psychologist Walter Mischel put 4 to 6-year-old children alone in a room with a marshmallow. Before he left the room, he’d tell them they could eat it now; or, if they waited a few minutes until he came back, they’d get two. The kids usually devoured the marshmallow immediately. Sometimes, however, Mischel told the children that one way to resist the marshmallow now and get two later is by pretending the marshmallow wasn’t there. By changing how he prepared them for the challenge, he dramatically changed their behavior: children could now wait 15 minutes without eating the marshmallow. Read the whole story: Forbes
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The Benefits of Being Distracted
The Wall Street Journal: Most people are more easily distracted as they get older. There might be a benefit to that. Research is finding that greater distractibility and a reduced ability to focus—what scientists call decreased cognitive control—is often associated with greater creativity in problem solving. It also can facilitate learning new information, according to a review of more than 100 studies that was published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences earlier this month.
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Traces of Times Lost
The Atlantic: The slippery baby in the plastic blue tub cringes when her daddy, holding a drippy orange washcloth, leaks a bit of water in her face. He is bathing her for the first time. “Make sure you get the folds in her neck, where milk hides,” I say, video recording the scene on my iPhone. We are new parents delighting in and stumbling through this moment. The three-year-old girl with pink paint-chipped toenails watches my iPhone video of that day when Daddy bathed her for the first time. She cringes as she sees her smaller self cringe. My daughter requested this clip out of more than 400, all starring her, most of which she has watched before. We are snuggled up on the sofa.
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You’re Less Persuasive Than You Think Over Email
People overestimated the persuasiveness of email requests and underestimated the effectiveness of requests made face-to-face.
