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The Brooding Mind: Making the Worst of Ambiguity
Imagine yourself at your 10-year high school reunion, a long anticipated get-together for you and all your old friends. You haven’t seen many of them since graduation day, and naturally everyone is comparing notes on
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Discovering the Roots of Memory
The Atlantic: As a 95-year-old psychologist, Brenda Milner still remembers the “bad old days” of frontal lobotomies as a treatment for psychosis. In fact, her research provided some of the first evidence showing why such
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A Thousand Words: Writing from Photographs
The New Yorker: I can’t remember exactly when I stopped carrying a notebook. Sometime in the past year, I gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway, copying the names of artists from
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And the Memory Wars Wage On
National Geographic: I was reminded of the “memory wars” of the 1990s yesterday when listening to an episode of Marc Maron’s popular WTF podcast. The guest, comedian Tom Arnold, told Maron about his traumatic childhood, which
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Feats of Memory at the 2014 APS Annual Convention
It’s not a supernatural power: Memorizing a deck of cards in less than a minute and a 300-word list in just a quarter of an hour are achievable feats for top memory athletes. At the
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Behavior’s Influence on Biology
One of the basic tenets of psychological science holds that the biology of our brains heavily influences our actions, behaviors, judgments, and more. But what if we reverse that premise and examine an opposite supposition
