-
Learning A New Skill Works Best To Keep Your Brain Sharp
NPR: Brain training is big business, with computerized brain games touted as a way to help prevent memory loss. But new research shows you might be better off picking up a challenging new hobby. To test this theory, Dr. Denise Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas, randomly assigned 200 older people to different activities. Some learned digital photography. Another group took up quilting. "Quilting may not seem like a mentally challenging task," Park says. "But if you're a novice and you're cutting out all these abstract shapes, it's a very demanding and complex task." The groups spent 15 hours a week for three months learning their new skills.
-
Serving Your Subordinates
In his book Arthashastra, the ancient Indian scholar Chanakya wrote that “the king shall consider as good, not what pleases himself, but what pleases his subjects.” That philosophy of leadership, embraced by many ancient religions, is increasingly being adopted in the professional world as organizations adopt people-centered management practices. Servant leadership, a concept modernized in the 20th century by the writer and consultant Robert Greenleaf, involves sharing power, putting the needs of others first, and helping followers perform at their best.
-
You don’t always know what you’re saying
Nature: If you think you know what you just said, think again. People can be tricked into believing they have just said something they did not, researchers report this week. The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance — speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say. But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak. So cognitive scientist Andreas Lind and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden wanted to see what would happen if someone said one word, but heard themselves saying another.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Learning and Memory Consolidation Processes of Attention-Bias Modification in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals Rany Abend, Daniel S. Pine, Nathan A. Fox, and Yair Bar-Haim Attention-bias-modification (ABM) paradigms are a type of computerized cognitive-training intervention that reduces attentional bias toward threatening stimuli. Research on ABM has tended to focus on the attentional changes produced by these programs rather than on the learning and consolidation processes that occur during training.
-
How Being Grateful Can Change Your Life
Fast Company: Keeping track of what you are grateful for may sound like like something Oprah Winfrey suggested decades ago. But today, several new studies suggest that practicing gratitude isn’t just for the Pollyannas of the world. Here are three benefits to being grateful: Gratitude is about focusing on other people, says Dr. Jo-Ann Tsang, a psychology professor at Baylor University, who led a study which will appear in the July 2014 issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences. “Previous research that we and others have done finds that people are motivated to help people that help them--and to help others as well.
-
Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes
The Washington Post: Are you one of those old-school types who insists that kids learn better when they leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand? If so, you’re right. There’s new evidence to prove it, and it’s unsettling because so many students aren’t really taught longhand anymore. According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, there’s no contest. Handwriters learn better, hands down. The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got more out of the lectures than the typists. Read the whole story: The Washington Post