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Can Tracking Your Moods Make You Happier?
Tracking daily steps can motivate us to walk more. Tracking sleep can reveal problems such as sleep apnea. Can tracking our moods make us happier? There are now many tech ways to log where you fall on the happy-sad spectrum each day. Fitbit offers mood logging in its stress-management tool. Period-tracking apps, such as Clue and Flo allow women to see how their moods fluctuate with their cycles. Apps like Daylio focus on mood. The latest big player to enter the arena is Apple. Its latest software updates—iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and WatchOS 10, due this fall and already out in public beta—include a way to log your state of mind.
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The Barbie-Taylor-Beyoncé Summer Offers a Release of Pandemic Emotions
... The summer’s major cultural phenomena — which also include Taylor Swift’s Eras concert tour and the “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” movies — have attracted audiences ready to go all-out. Thanks to a wide range of social, cultural and economic factors, it’s a season of hype as well as dress-up, fun and freedom. For some, it is also tied up with the pandemic, perhaps another chance to check off a post-covid “first,” feel like they’re living life to the fullest or celebrate that they’re okay with screaming song lyrics in a crowd of 70,000 people again.
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A ‘Failure to Launch’: Why Young People Are Having Less Sex
Vivian Rhodes figured she would eventually have sex. She was raised in a Christian household in Washington state and thought sex before marriage would be the ultimate rebellion. But then college came and went — and no sex. Even flirting “felt unnatural,” she said. In her early 20s, she watched someone she followed on Tumblr come out as asexual and realized that’s how she felt: She had yet to develop romantic feelings for anyone, and the physical act of sex just didn’t sound appealing. “Some people assume this is about shaming other people, and it’s not,” said Rhodes, 28, who works as a certified nursing assistant in Los Angeles. “I’m glad people have fun with it and it works for them.
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Our Brains May Process Silence and Sounds the Same Way
Can you hear the sound of silence? It’s a question that may seem better suited to a philosophy class (or a Simon & Garfunkel concert) than a science lab, but a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests people really can “hear” the absence of noise. If the finding holds up, it could help researchers better understand the way the human auditory system processes sound, as well as the lack thereof. “We can certainly appreciate silences, cognitively,” says Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University who wasn’t involved in the work.
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Images in the Mind’s Eye Are Quick Sketches That Lack Simple, Real-World Details
Here were the simple instructions given by a Harvard University assistant professor to people participating in a recent cognitive science study: “Imagine the following scene. Visualize it in your mind’s eye, as vividly as you can: a person walks into a room and knocks a ball off a table.” The professor, Tomer Ullman, then asked those in the study about nine properties of their mental images, including the color and size of the ball, the shape and size of the table, and the person’s hair color and height. If you are anything like the people in the study, you only visualized a subset of all of these properties. Did you see how big the ball was? How about the person’s hair color?
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2 Reasons Why We Need to Spend More Time Thinking About Nothing, According to a Psychologist
According to a classic study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, it is likely that the more we use our brains, the less age-related cognitive decline we experience. But what does this really mean? Does it mean that we all need to become around-the-clock thinkers and information processing machines? Probably not. Humans are expected to keep up with the blazing speed of technological advancement today. This inevitably leads to the fast-paced life we are all familiar with. Given the relentless pace of modern life, it is unsurprising that the prevalence of mental illness is increasing. ...