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This column will change your life: the mind-body connection
The Guardian: In the 1988 comedy Big, you may recall, a 12-year-old boy is transported into the body of Tom Hanks – a nightmarish twist on Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist gets off comparatively lightly by being transported into the body of a giant beetle. Neither story's believable, of course, but as the psychologist Paul Bloom points out, what's interesting is that they don't strike us as meaningless, either: on some level, we can imagine how it might feel to wake up in another body. That's because most of us are what philosophers call "dualists": intuitively, we think of mind and body as two different entities, neither reducible to the other.
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Erst abschalten, dann aufdrehen (Turn off first, then turn on)
Suddeutsche Zeitung: Alles ist zu viel. Immer. Die Stapel auf dem Schreibtisch wachsen stetig in die Höhe, werden umsortiert, hin und her geschoben und erinnern den Büromenschen doch nur ans tägliche Scheitern. Wieder die eigenen Ansprüche verfehlt, wieder nicht alle Mails beantwortet. Nach Dienstschluss fällt dann zwar die Bürotür ins Schloss, doch die Arbeit begleitet viele Menschen nach Hause und ins Privatleben. Das E-Mail-Postfach lässt sich auch auf dem Smartphone checken, während die Kinder die Zähne putzen. Am Projekt lässt sich auch am Wochenende feilen.
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If We Feel Too Busy, It’s Probably Due to Having Too Much Free Time
Scientific American: Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves with selfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science. Researchers interrupted more than 200 students in class and asked them to complete different five-minute tasks. Some had to cross out the letter “e” in pages of text. Others wrote a letter to a sick child. When surveyed afterward, the group that wrote letters perceived themselves to have more time in general than those who did the crossing out.
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Hitting Your Kids Increases Their Risk of Mental Illness
TIME: What if we, as a society, could cut down on the incidence of mental illness by backing away from hitting, grabbing or pushing our children? That’s a prospect raised by a new study in Pediatrics, which finds that harsh physical punishment increases the risk of mental disorders — even when the punishment doesn’t stoop to the level of actual abuse. What qualifies as appropriate punishment is a hot-button topic among parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes corporal punishment, but studies have shown that up to 80% of parents report that they rely on it to some extent.
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Why Getting Respect Is Better Than Getting Rich
Forbes: Would you rather have money or respect? According to a new report by researchers at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and published in the journal Psychological Science, how much you are respected and admired by those around you contributes more to your overall happiness than the contents of your bank account. The researchers conducted a series of four studies among enrolled college students and MBA graduates, using peer ratings, self-reporting, leadership positions, total household income and questions related to their well-being to determine measures of peer respect and personal wealth.
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¿Se es mas sabio con la edad? (Are we wiser with age?)
ABC España: Todos recordamos la serie Kung Fu, con el anciano e inteligente maestro chino dando consejos a su «pequeño saltamontes». Hace dos años, Igor Grossmann, de la Universidad de Waterloo (Canadá), se preguntó si realmente era así, si con la edad uno se hace más sabio. Grossman realizó una investigación en los Estados Unidos y llegó a la conclusión de que los norteamericanos de edad avanzada eran más listos que los más jóvenes. Ahora, sin embargo, ha realizado un experimento parecido en Japón y ha llegado al resultado de que los «pequeños saltamontes» amarillos son tan avispados como sus mayores prácticamente desde el principio.
