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Awe, With And Without The Gods
NPR: In a 2006 article for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris identified 10 myths about atheism, among them the idea that "atheists are closed to spiritual experience." Harris explained: "There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly." ... So why the persistent idea that awe is inextricably linked to theism? And are "scientific awe" and "religious awe" fundamentally different, or deep down one and the same? To be sure, awe is a multifaceted emotion, and one that's only recently become the target of systematic psychological research.
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Learning How to Exert Self-Control
The New York Times: PARIS — NOT many Ivy League professors are associated with a type of candy. But Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia, doesn’t mind being one of them. “I’m the marshmallow man,” he says, with a modest shrug. I’m with Mr. Mischel (pronounced me-SHELL) in his tiny home office in Paris, where he spends the summer with his girlfriend. We’re watching grainy video footage of preschoolers taking the “marshmallow test,” the legendary experiment on self-control that he invented nearly 50 years ago. In the video, a succession of 5-year-olds sit at a table with cookies on it (the kids could pick their own treats).
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Don’t just photograph life’s highlights, study suggests
The Boston Globe: We assiduously document life’s obvious highlights: Our cellphones are filled with photos of the first day of school, graduations, weddings, and birthdays. A new study by a team of Harvard Business School researchers suggests, however, that we underestimate the pleasure we will gain from rediscovering our most mundane moments. In fact, the most boring, everyday stuff may give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary experiences.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Early Experience Affects the Strength of Vigilance for Threat in Rhesus Monkey Infants Tara M. Mandalaywala, Karen J. Parker, and Dario Maestripieri Research has suggested that the cognitive bias to threatening stimuli (i.e., attention toward and vigilance for threat) displayed by adult human and nonhuman primates may arise in part from early experiences. The researchers measured 3- and 9-month-old infant rhesus macaques' cognitive bias to threat by measuring their eye gaze in response to pictures of neutral and threatening macaque faces.
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Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American
The New York Times: FLORENCE, Italy — WE think of our senses as hard-wired gateways to the world. Many years ago the social psychologist Daryl J. Bem described the knowledge we gain from our senses as “zero-order beliefs,” so taken for granted that we do not even notice them as beliefs. The sky is blue. The fan hums. Ice is cold. That’s the nature of reality, and it seems peculiar that different people with their senses intact would experience it subjectively. Yet they do. In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific.
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Why Food Pilgrims Will Wait Four Hours For A Taste Of The Sublime
NPR: During a trip to Austin, Texas, last year, Sarah Grieco and her friends stood in line for two hours to taste the famously delicious smoked meat at La Barbecue. Before that, Grieco, 25, says she queued up for pork belly pancakes in Seattle, and ramen burgers in New York. And she and a friend waited three hours for the flashy cronut at Dominic Ansel Bakery. The food hasn't always lived up to the hype — she wasn't a fan of the ramen burgers. But, she says, she usually doesn't mind waiting to taste something truly unique. "I don't see it as time wasted," she says. "I see it as part of the experience." Dedicated — and exceedingly patient — food pilgrims like Grieco are everywhere.
