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Coney Island’s Rides Have Delighted (and Frightened) Us for Decades
In May 1914, Coney Island played host to an unlikely party of VIPs led by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife, Lady Doyle. A New York Times reporter trailed the group all day, hoping for a quote from the famed creator of Sherlock Holmes. “First he shot the chutes, then he took the seemingly perilous Whip ride, and finally he went into the ridiculous Crazy Village,” wrote the dutiful journalist. “And he enjoyed it all — particularly the Whip, which he pronounced thrilling.” It was past midnight when Mr. Doyle left. He was dazed, to put it mildly. The man who’d invented the most brilliant, analytical detective in the history of popular culture had been overwhelmed by the park.
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It’s Never Too Late to Start a Brilliant Career
In 1980, I was 25 and hadn’t yet bloomed. This hit home one night while I was working as a security guard in San Jose, Calif. Just after dark, as I started my perimeter patrol of a fenced rent-a-truck yard, I heard barking from the lumber yard next door. I swung my flashlight around and came face-to-face with my counterpart on the other side of the fence: a guard dog. The implication was sobering. I was a Stanford graduate, and my professional peer was a Rottweiler. In a few months, Steve Jobs, also 25 at the time, would take Apple public, change the computer industry and become fabulously rich. I, on the other hand, was poor and stuck. My story is embarrassing, but is it that unusual?
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring factors related to disordered gambling, suicidal behavior and stress generation, and attention and depression.
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Building Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Assignments From Carol Dweck
Growth mindsets aren't just for students. It helps for teachers to have a growth mindset about their students' mindsets, too. A teacher's classroom approach shapes whether their students believe they are born with fixed academic skills or can grow them through practice and experience, according to Carol Dweck, the Stanford University researcher who pioneered the study of academic mindsets. "Mindsets create a psychological world with very different meanings," Dweck said in a keynote at the annual Association of Psychological Science conference this weekend. "Those with a fixed mindset tend to think that if you have to work hard at something, you're not good at it. ...
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Don’t Just Learn From Failure; Learn From Your Successes
For many of us—no matter where we work or what we do—nothing feels as good as success. And for many of us, nothing is more harmful to our growth and development To understand why this is, compare success to failure. Companies tell their employees over and over again to embrace your failures, to ask yourselves what went wrong and to take advantage of all the learning opportunities that failure affords. But when it comes to success, companies rarely feel the urge to stop and see what they can learn from their experience, and what they may want to change. Rather, the instinct is to assume that if they succeeded, all is good with the world. What did we do right? Everything.
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How To See The Future (No Crystal Ball Needed)
After a disaster happens, we want to know, could something have been done to avoid it? Did anyone see this coming? Many times, the answer is yes. There was a person — or many people — who spotted a looming crisis and tried to warn those in power. So why didn't the warnings lead to action? This week on Hidden Brain, we look into the psychology of warnings. Plus, we'll learn why ordinary people can sometimes do a better job of predicting the future than the so-called experts. They're the subject of the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored by psychologist Phil Tetlock and journalist Dan Gardner.
