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Daydreaming—You Are Doing It Wrong. How To Make Your Fantasies More Productive
Fast Company: Daydreaming often gets a bad rap. In a world focused on being as efficient and productive as possible, distracted mind wandering seems like a blatant waste of time. Fantasies alone can actually be de-motivating. If you dream of an ideal future, you experience some of the pleasure of having that future just because you’re dreaming about it. It is hard to be too motivated to work to change yourself when you are already feeling good about your life. But fantasies about the future (say, your dream job) can be motivating if you use them in the right way. Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues at NYU have been studying the role of fantasies in goal achievement for decades.
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Throwback Thursday: The Psychology Behind its Success
CNN: FORTUNE -- I archive dive almost every Thursday, searching for the perfect photograph: a shot from one of college's many Ugly Sweater parties; my best friend and I, 20 pounds lighter, grinning at prom; my sisters and I huddled together in 1996, our matching bowl cuts perfectly aligned. With a little help from the slight aging powers of the Valencia filter, my picture-perfect memories are posted to Instagram -- never without the beloved #tbt hashtag. I'm far from Instagram's only wistful user. To date, more than 228 million photos have been tagged with a "Throwback Thursday" hashtag -- either #tbt or #throwbackthursday -- indicating the use of a crowd-pleasing photo from days gone by.
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Apps Intended to Speed Up Reading Rate May Reduce Comprehension
The Washington Post: Readers of this space learned a few weeks ago about Spritz, an app that promises to dramatically increase your reading speed by converting text to a fast-moving sequence of individual words or phrases. Because the text is moving, your eyeballs don’t have to, so you get through words faster. Such speed-reading apps have been getting a lot of attention, but a newstudy published in the journal Psychological Science warns of a downside: You may read faster but learn less.
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Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)
The Atlantic: The idea of the emblem is obvious: This is an illustration of a trophy with an abstract soccer ball on top. The colors—green, yellow, and blue—mirror the host country's flag. Now consider this tweet from copywriter Holly Brockwell, which got 2,400 thousand retweets: "CANNOT UNSEE: the Brazil 2014 logo has been criticised for 'looking like a facepalm.'" ... I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo.
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How Your Hobbies Impact Your Work Performance
Inc. Magazine: Hopefully, you don’t need an extra reason to enjoy your hobbies, but if you happen to be one of the many professionals who are struggling to keep their constant busyness from encroaching on their favorite activities, a new study might give you a motivation boost to keep up with your pastime of choice. The research out of San Francisco State University looked at how creative activities like knitting, cooking, painting, photography, gardening or what-have-you affect work performance.
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Accents Can Carry Over When You Switch Between Languages
Switching back and forth between two different languages presents a cognitive challenge that can trip up even the most fluent bilingual speakers. Researcher Matthew Goldrick of Northwestern University and colleagues wondered whether the disruptions caused by language-switching might extend beyond the ability to produce words to influence how bilingual speakers actually pronounce words. They hypothesized that switching between languages might lead to accent “contamination,” whereby a speaker’s native language influences the subsequent pronunciation of words in a nonnvative language.
