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This is your brain on music
CNN: Whether you are rocking out to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in your car or reading with Bach in your bedroom, music has a special ability to pump us up or calm us down. Scientists are still trying to figure out what's going on in our brains when we listen to music and how it produces such potent effects on the psyche. "We're using music to better understand brain function in general," said Daniel Levitin, a prominent psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal. Three studies published this month explore how the brain responds to music.
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Mindfulness Could Improve College Students’ Testing Ability, Study Finds
The Huffington Post: As if the stress-relieving, healthifying effects of mindfulness weren't enough, a new study shows it could actually help students perform better on tests by boosting their memory and reading comprehension skills. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that mindfulness training could help college students do better on the verbal reasoning part of the GRE (Graduate Record Examination, an admissions test commonly used for graduate school).
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Can Neuroscience Explain Innovation?
Forbes: We continue our conversation with Janet Crawford, a pioneer in applying neuroscience to improve business performance. In today’s part, we discuss the interplay between human biology and innovation. To read . Can you give an example of how biology affects the innovation process?
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The Internet ‘Narcissism Epidemic’
The Atlantic: We are in the midst of a "narcissism epidemic," concluded psychologists Jean M. Twnege and W. Keith Campbell in their 2009 book. One study they describe showed that among a group of 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as quickly as obesity from the 1980s to the present. Fortunately for narcissists, the continued explosion of social networking has provided them with productivity tools to continually expand their reach -- the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, and occasionally Google Plus. Evidence for the rise in narcissism continues to come up in research and news. A study by psychologist Dr.
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What About the Victim: The Steubenville Rape Victim’s Recovery
TIME: How does public exposure affect recovery from a very private, traumatic experience? ... We do know that the more severe the traumatic experience is, the more severe the reaction will be,” says Edna Foa, a professor of clinical psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading expert on trauma. Rape, regardless of the level of physical force involved, is always traumatic, although, fortunately, the vast majority of people who suffer trauma do not develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).But in this case, the victim was betrayed by a young man she trusted.
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Looking for a Lesson in Google’s Perks
The New York Times: After my visit, I spoke to Teresa Amabile, a business administration professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of “The Progress Principle,” about creativity at work, and told her I had just been to Google. “Isn’t it fantastic?” she said. Some of her former students work there, and “they feel very, very fortunate to be there,” she said. As to the broader relationship between the workplace and creativity, “there’s some evidence that great physical space enhances creativity,” she said. “The theory is that open spaces that are fun, where people want to be, facilitate idea exchange.
