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Play Piano for Brain Health — Because It’s Not Too Late To Learn and It Slows Cognitive Decline
Learning new skills as an adult can be difficult. We’ve established our habits and routines. Old dogs, new tricks, et cetera. As a child, your day was planned out, and you didn’t have as many responsibilities; you were free to spend time rollerskating, jumping rope, or learning a musical instrument. The latter is one thing many adults wish they’d done in their younger years. Not only is playing an instrument fun and impressive, but it’s also intellectually stimulating. There's good news, though: Even if you've never beat a drum, strummed a guitar, or tickled the ivories, it’s not too late. to start.
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‘Spell-Checker for Statistics’ Reduces Errors in the Psychology Literature
A free-to-use tool designed to detect statistical errors is significantly reducing the number of mistakes creeping into papers, suggests a study published this January1. First described in a 2015 publication2, statcheck is an online tool that can identify errors in the P values — a controversial but popular statistical measure — reported in scientific papers. The tool, developed by Michèle Nuijten, a methodologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been applied to tens of thousands of psychology studies during peer review and by authors themselves, and according to a 2017 study, it is right more than 95% of the time3.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on how mnemonic content and hippocampal patterns shape our judgment of time, well-being and cognitive resilience, face familiarization, the prioritization of due process, and much more.
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Role-Playing Goes a Long Way in STEM Education
The North Carolina Science Festival offers hundreds of science-related events and activities across the state for the entire month of April. It covers all fields of science for all knowledge levels, including opportunities for children to pretend to be scientists. It turns out that pretending encourages children to pursue science fields. That’s especially true for girls. It’s no secret that women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields.
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The Difference Between Speaking and Thinking
Language is commonly understood as the instrument of thought. People “talk it out” and “speak their mind,” follow “trains of thought” or “streams of consciousness.” Some of the pinnacles of human creation—music, geometry, computer programming—are framed as metaphorical languages. The underlying assumption is that the brain processes the world and our experience of it through a progression of words. And this supposed link between language and thinking is a large part of what makes ChatGPT and similar programs so uncanny: The ability of AI to answer any prompt with human-sounding language can suggest that the machine has some sort of intent, even sentience.
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Your Native Tongue Holds a Special Place in Your Brain, Even if You Speak 10 Languages
Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages. In a new brain imaging study, researchers peered inside the minds of polyglots like Smith to tease out how language-specific regions in their brains respond to hearing different languages. Familiar languages elicited a stronger reaction than unfamiliar ones, they found, with one important exception: native languages, which provoked relatively little brain activity. This, the authors note, suggests there’s something special about the languages we learn early in life.
