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Eureka? Yes, Eureka!
The New York Times: In the commencement address he delivered at Harvard last month, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, warned the graduating students not to trust the story of innovation that Hollywood promotes — namely, “the idea of a single eureka moment” in which a lone thinker has a groundbreaking epiphany. He characterized this idea as “a dangerous lie” that discourages real creativity. “You know what else movies get wrong about innovation?” Mr. Zuckerberg added. “No one writes math formulas on glass. That’s not a thing.” Actually, that is a thing, although sometimes people carve their formulas in stone if there isn’t any glass to write on.
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Science Shows How Faces Guide, and Reflect, Our Social Lives
A special issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science illuminates the myriad ways in which face perception infuses our thinking and behavior.
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When Your Child Is a Psychopath
The Atlantic: This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish. ... Psychopaths not only fail to recognize distress in others, they may not feel it themselves.
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The Making Of Emotions, From Pleasurable Fear To Bittersweet Relief
NPR: Emotions, the classic thinking goes, are innate, basic parts of our humanity. We are born with them, and when things happen to us, our emotions wash over us. "They happen to us, almost," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She's also the author of a book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. In it, she argues for a new theory of emotions which is featured in the latest episode of NPR's program and podcast Invisibilia. Read the whole story: NPR
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The Benefits of Talking to Yourself
The New York Times: A stranger approached me at a grocery store. “Do you need help finding something?” he asked. At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant. Then the realization kicked in: I was talking out loud, to myself, in public. It was a habit I’d grown so comfortable with that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. The fairly common habit of talking aloud to yourself is what psychologists call external self-talk. And although self-talk is sometimes looked at as just an eccentric quirk, research has found that it can influence behavior and cognition. “Language provides us with this tool to gain distance from our own experiences when we’re reflecting on our lives.
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REMEMBERING THE MURDER YOU DIDN’T COMMIT
The New Yorker: When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eight-year-old widow. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. “She was my grandmother’s age.” Taylor confessed to the woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty. She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned.
