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Failure Is an Art and How to Do It, or Avoid It, Like a Champion
Failure as a noun means lack of success, omission of required action, or the collapse of a business. It can be embarrassing and painful to experience. Most will do anything to avoid failure—nobody wants to fail. “We want to prevent failure, and that’s why we come up with reasons for why we shouldn’t do things we want to do. We tell ourselves no because we don’t think we’re ready yet,” James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, says. “It’s also why we abandon our ideas. But ‘no’ rarely means impossible …. Usually if someone tells you no, what they really mean is ‘not right now or ‘not in that way.’” Experts agree failure isn’t a destination but more so a redirection.
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What Makes a Person Trustworthy? Science May Provide Some Clues
Knowing who to trust is part and parcel of everyday life. Instinctively we may trust one person but not fully understand why. Researchers have puzzled over this question for decades, trying to piece together what makes a person trustworthy or not. “Trustworthiness is essentially being a prosocial person,” says Sebastian Siuda, a psychologist who researches the dynamics of trust. “If somebody opens up to you and makes [themselves] vulnerable to you, you don’t use that act for your own good, but you repay that vulnerability.” ...
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Loneliness Across the Globe: A Life-Span Approach
Podcast: Under the Cortex hosts Samia Akther Khan, King’s College London, whose research examines the feeling of loneliness across lifespan.
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The Science of Happiness Sounds Great. But Is the Research Solid?
In a new review in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers Elizabeth Dunn and Dunigan Folk found that many common strategies for increasing our happiness may not be supported by strong evidence. In fact, almost 95% of experiments on three common strategies—spending time in nature, exercise and engaging in mindfulness/meditation—did not hold up to even the most basic of current best practices for showing psychological effects. ...
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Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests
The hush at the end of the musical performance. The pause in a dramatic speech. The muted moment when you turn off the car. What is it that we hear when we hear nothing at all? Are we detecting silence? Or are we just hearing nothing and interpreting that absence as silence? The “Sound of Silence” is a philosophical question that made for one of Simon & Garfunkel’s most enduring songs, but it’s also a subject that can be tested by psychologists. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds.
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To Stay Sharp as You Age, Learn New Skills
In most adults, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline after age 30 or 40. People start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper after 60 years of age. These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But what if instead they represent something more like the “summer slide” that schoolchildren experience? Every year teachers and parents observe how summer vacations lead some children’s academic progress to backslide.
