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Experts: Conflicting eyewitness accounts aren’t surprising
The Washington Post: National experts on eyewitness testimony said it’s not surprising that there would be so many conflicting accounts — particularly of a chaotic crime scene. Memory, they say, isn’t like a video recording. Our brains encode only fragmented images of events, which are instantly malleable. A quick, violent event — particularly one involving a gun — can be one the most challenging scenarios for an eyewitness to fully and accurately recall. A phenomenon called “weapon focus” becomes one of the biggest obstacles to seeing details of an event and remembering them as a whole.
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Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter
Scientific American: If you’ve spent more than about 5 minutes surfing the web, listening to the radio, or watching TV in the past few years, you will know that cognitive training—better known as “brain training”—is one of the hottest new trends in self improvement. Lumosity, which offers web-based tasks designed to improve cognitive abilities such as memory and attention, boasts 50 million subscribers and advertises on National Public Radio. Cogmed claims to be “a computer-based solution for attention problems caused by poor working memory,” and BrainHQ will help you “make the most of your unique brain.” The promise of all of these products, implied or explicit, is that brain training can m…
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This is what powerful people sound like
CBS News: What do you think of when you conjure the sound of a powerful voice? Something deep, loud, booming, most likely. According to a recent study in the journal Psychological Science, the sounds of power is actually in the details -- a particular modulation of pitch and volume that lets even strangers know who's in charge. Researchers at San Diego State University had participants role-play scenarios in which they felt powerful or subordinate, then read a passage of text into a recorder.
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A Persuasive Chart Showing How Persuasive Charts Are
The New York Times: Here at The Upshot, we love charts. And I have a chart to explain why. But first, some background. In a study recently published in the journal “Public Understanding of Science,” two Cornell researchers, Brian Wansinkand Aner Tal, ran a small online survey to assess whether alternative descriptions of the same information were more persuasive. Each respondent read the following description of a mythical drug trial: “A large pharmaceutical company has recently developed a new drug to boost peoples’ immune function. It reports that trials it conducted demonstrated a drop of 40 percent (from 87 to 47 percent) in occurrence of the common cold.
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A Final Goodbye to a Family Home
The Wall Street Journal: I have managed to navigate most trials in middle age (job changes, children leaving home, deceased pets) with a fair amount of grace. But now I find myself strangely unnerved by an event beyond my control: My childhood home is about to be torn down. This summer, my parents sold the 2,000-square-foot split-level they bought in a suburb of New York City in the early 1970s.
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Ellen Langer: Mindfulness And The Power Of Thought
NPR: Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer is known as the “mother of mindfulness.” Her research focuses on the many benefits of purposefully paying attention,and in contrast,the psychological and professional costs of thought patterns that limit awareness. Ellen Langer describes what it takes to become more mindful and why it can have such profound effects on our health, ability to learn and overall well-being. Please join us for a conversation with Ellen Langer on harnessing the power of thought. Hear the whole story: NPR
