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How Noise Pollution Impairs Learning
The Atlantic: One July afternoon in 1972, a team of psychologists took sound meters into the Bridge Apartments, a cluster of four high-rise buildings straddling Interstate 95 in Manhattan. Because of the towers’ proximity to the highway, the hum of traffic filled the buildings’ halls. Even on the eighth floor, the decibel level was 66, just slightly quieter than a running vacuum cleaner. The noise died down as the researchers climbed the stairs, though. On the 32nd floor, the reading was 55 decibels, or about the level of a conversation in a restaurant.
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Working With Jerks Could Be Screwing Up Your Relationships
New York Magazine: There’s more to the relationship between your professional and personal life than setting a witty “away” message when you finally go on vacation. Like Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer would say, acting like there’s a wall between your “work” and your “life” is misguided, since you’re the same being, with the same consciousness, and the same needs, whether you have Slack open or not. ... In what will be no surprise to anyone who’s ever worked with a contemptuous maniac, when people had hostile work experiences — one example from the study is if a colleague “put you down or act[ed] condescending to you” — they were less pleasant to be around when at home.
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Computer game improves children’s math performance
The Baltimore Sun: Parents whose children struggle with math may have new reason to be hopeful: A recent study at the Johns Hopkins University suggests that young people can improve their performance by carrying out a few simple computer exercises unrelated to numbers or math symbols. ... People generally believe that children must practice math problems similar to those they will see on a test in order to get better at math in school. Wang's team took a different approach, testing whether exercising children's approximate number sense, not their learned abilities, would help them perform better in math. It did.
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Face It: Nonprofit CEOs Benefit from Having a Baby Face
Dominant facial features may not be beneficial to leaders in in the nonprofit world, research suggests.
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Are We the Only Animals That Understand Ignorance?
The Atlantic: You’re holding a surprise party for a friend. The door opens, the lights flick on, everyone leaps out... and your friend stands there silent and unmoved. Now,you’re the one who’s surprised. You assumed she had no idea, and based on that, you made a (wrong) prediction about how she would react. You were counting on her ignorance. This ability to understand that someone else might be missing certain information about the world comes so naturally to us that describing it feels mundane and trite. And yet, according to two psychologists, it’s a skill that only humans have. “We think monkeys can’t do that,” says Alia Martin from Victoria University of Wellington. ...
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What Your Brain Looks Like When It Solves a Math Problem
The New York Times: Solving a hairy math problem might send a shudder of exultation along your spinal cord. But scientists have historically struggled to deconstruct the exact mental alchemy that occurs when the brain successfully leaps the gap from “Say what?” to “Aha!” Now, using an innovative combination of brain-imaging analyses, researchers have captured four fleeting stages of creative thinking in math. In a paper published in Psychological Science, a team led by John R.
