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How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children
Nature: “What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”. ...
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Why You Should Break Up With Your Smartphone During Lunch Breaks
Scrolling through apps on a smartphone might actually sap cognitive resources rather than restoring them during breaks.
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How to raise kinder, less entitled kids (according to science)
The Washington Post: Maybe it was that time you took the kids to the amusement park, and on the way home — their adorable faces still sticky from the slushies you’d sprung for, their little wrists adorned with pricey full-day passes — they asked to stop for ice cream. You declined, and they yelled, “We never get to do anything!” Or the time you asked them to dust the living room after you had vacuumed the house, cleaned the bathroom, mowed the lawn and shopped for groceries, and they wailed, “Do we have to do everything?” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Our Need to Make And Enforce Rules Starts Very Young
The Wall Street Journal: Hundreds of social conventions govern our lives: Forks go on the left, red means stop and don’t, for heaven’s sake, blow bubbles in your milk. Such rules may sometimes seem trivial or arbitrary. But our ability to construct them and our expectation that everyone should follow them are core mechanisms of human culture, law and morality. Rules help turn a gang of individuals into a functioning community. ... In a clever 2008 study, the psychologists Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello showed systematically how sensitive very young children are to rules.
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What Do Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Warren and Tim Duncan Have in Common?
The New York Times: The study was almost laughably arcane: Air Force cadets’ pupils tended to dilate more when they read cartoons they thought were funny than for ones they didn’t think were funny. But the real punch line of this 1978 experiment — “Pupillary size as an indicator of preference in humor,” published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills — is what became of one of the authors, listed as Sullenberger, C. B. Chesley B.
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Wanted: Mars Explorers. Must Be Able To Tolerate Boredom And Play Nice With Others.
FiveThirtyEight: In December, NASA put out a call for adventurers interested in interplanetary exploration. “NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there,” Charles Bolden, NASA administrator and a former astronaut, said in the announcement. More than 18,000 people answered the call, and between now and mid-2017, that vast pool of applications will be cut to 120 finalists, who will vie to become part of NASA’s next class of eight to 12 astronauts. ... Researchers involved in HI-SEAS are working on ways to defuse conflicts, and the first step is spotting them before anyone blows up.
