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50 Shades of Gray Matter
The Chronicle of Higher Education: You’ve seen the headlines: This is your brain on God, envy, cocaine. And you’ve seen the evidence: slices of brain with Technicolor splotches lit up like the Las Vegas Strip. On average, one new book about the brain appears every week. In universities, new disciplines of neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, and neurolaw are flourishing. “If Warhol were around today, he’d have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe,” one observer quipped. It is easy to see why the brain is a hot commodity.
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Why Stage Parents Push Their Kids
TIME: In the first study to experimentally investigate the phenomenon, researchers say it’s the unfulfilled ambitions of moms and dads that fuel their pushy parenting. Tigers moms and sports dads, according to the investigation published in the journal PLOS One, are trying to mitigate their own failures by living through their children.
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How Reading Makes Us More Human
The Atlantic: A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response, Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter and nicer," among other things.
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Using Money to Buy Happiness
Scientific American: We live in America with two bits of contradictory received wisdom — that you’d be a lot better off if you made more money, and that money can’t buy you happiness. Now two scholars suggest another way of thinking about the relationship between cash and joy: To a large degree, how you spend is just as important as how much you spend. Michael Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and coauthor – with Elizabeth Dunn – of Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Teens’ Self-Consciousness Linked With Specific Brain, Physiological Responses
Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge in adolescence. “Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
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Senior Moment? Ageist Stereotypes Can Hurt — Or Help — Older Adults’ Memory
Of the many negative stereotypes that exist about older adults, the most common is that they are forgetful, senile, and prone to so-called “senior moments.” In fact, while cognitive processes tend to decline with age, new research reveals that simply reminding older adults about ageist ideas actually exacerbates their memory problems. The new findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
