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Is Obesity a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
There are lots of people of normal, healthy weight who, when they look in the mirror, see a fat person. Many of them know that their perceptions are skewed, because trusted friends and family have testified that they are slender, yet they can’t deny what they see in their reflection and mind’s eye. Such distorted perception is especially common among teenagers, and it has been linked to poor self-esteem and eating disorders. Adolescents who see themselves as overweight are more likely to use diet pills, laxatives, vomiting and extreme dieting to lose their imagined weight.
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Q&A: The Teaching Brain
NPR: Vanessa Rodriguez is co-author, with Michelle Fitzpatrick, of the new book, The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education. In it, they contrast behaviorist models of instruction, which cast the learner's brain as an "empty vessel" to be filled with knowledge, with cognitive psychology models, which view learning as a more dynamic and vibrant process, starting at birth. Rodriguez taught in New York City public schools for 10 years before pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in human development and education. Read the whole story: NPR
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People Don’t Hate Millennials
Slate: I know, I know. Millennials have been written to death. But I’m going to make like the millennial I am and say it’s my duty, as the voice of my generation (avoice of a generation?), to proclaim: You don’t hate millennials; you hate the 21st century. Millennials, those born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are infamously narcissistic,entitled, lazy, arrogant, wild, politically disengaged suckers who will fall for any weird fad. But except for that last one, which is totally true, these clichés are silly and easily debunked. Yet people keep spitting out condescending explainers and bitter grumbles about “millennial” propensities like slacktivism, iPhone addiction, and irony culture. ...
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Restoring a Master’s Voice
The New York Times: Training a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell would have seemed pretty stupid to Ivan Pavlov. He was after much bigger things. Using instruments like metronomes and harmoniums, he demonstrated that a dog could make astonishingly fine discriminations — distinguishing between a rhythm of 96 and 104 beats a minute or an ascending and a descending musical scale. But what he really wanted to know was what his animals were thinking. His dream was a grand theory of the mind.
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The Scientific Case for Low Expectations on New Year’s Eve
New York Magazine: You may have seen by now that web-only clip of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which Oliver emerges from hiatus to yell for a bit about how New Year’s Eve celebrations are the worst and we should all probably just stay home with our cats, or something to that effect. As is so often the case with Oliver’s rants, he is probably correct. Your high expectations of having a fun New Year’s Eve will most likely mean the actual events of the night will turn out to be a big fat disappointment, according to a funny and clever bit of research from behavioral scientist and best-selling author Dan Ariely. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Dare to Dream of Falling Short
The New York Times: Ever hear the joke about the guy who dreams of winning the lottery? After years of desperate fantasizing, he cries out for God’s help. Down from heaven comes God’s advice: “Would you buy a ticket already?!” Clearly, this starry-eyed dreamer is, like so many of us, a believer in old-fashioned positive thinking: Find your dream, wish for it, and success will be yours. Not quite, according to Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, who uses this joke to illustrate the limitations of the power of positive thinking. In her smart, lucid book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,” Dr.
