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Solving For X, Among the Neurons
Huffington Post: I have a fence that needs scraping and painting, and I'm pretty sure I can do the whole job in six hours. My friend Jack, who is an experienced painter, wants me to hire him. He promises he can have a new coat of paint on the fence in four hours. I'm tempted, but I'm wondering, what if Jack and I work together? If he does the trim and other detail work, and I do the easy brushing, we should be able to wrap this job up by lunchtime, easy. But how long will it take, exactly?
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Lolo’s No Choke
TIME: Choke. The word just sounds so noxious, really. Never mind its ties to suffocation and death. Just say it: choke. Athletes in particular would like to strangle the scribe who first applied such an ugly term to their most spectacular — and public — failures. Count Lolo Jones among them. Jones, the telegenic American hurdler, lived through a nightmare in Beijing. With a commanding lead in the 100-m event, on the verge of taking the gold and winning Americans’ hearts with her good looks and homeless-to-heroine story, she clipped the ninth hurdle. There are 10 of them. She stumbled across the line to finish in seventh place, then tumbled to the ground in a pool of tears.
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Even a fake grin may help lower heart rate in stressful situations
CBS News: A fake smile might be better for you than no grin at all, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Kansas discovered that if people were told to hold a facial position similar to smiling - whether they knew they were supposed to be grinning or not - they had lower heart rates after a stressful situation. "This is not going to cure you if you have chronic stress or a major life event like a tornado," Dr. Sarah Pressman, assistant professor of psychology and co-author of the study, told HealthPop. "But, it's almost impossible to be really angry or really stressed with this big smile on your face....
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George A. Miller, a Pioneer in Cognitive Psychology, Is Dead at 92
The New York Times: Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology. The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviorism, had rejected Freud’s theories of “the mind” as too intangible, untestable and vaguely mystical. Its researchers instead studied behavior in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects’ responses to carefully administered stimuli. Mainly, they studied rats. Dr.
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Why men (yes, men) are better multitaskers
We should all be forgiven for believing that women are good at multitasking, and far superior to men. After all, that’s the popular image that has been in circulation for some time. In this depiction, a vibrant 30-something woman, still in her business suit after a demanding day at the office, is cooking a gourmet meal, balancing a toddler on her hip, all while talking on the phone, presumably raising money for a local charity. Popular books, like Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking, reinforce the idea that men are incapable of matching women’s cognitive balancing act.
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Did Your Brain Make You Do It?
The New York Times: ARE you responsible for your behavior if your brain “made you do it”? Often we think not. For example, research now suggests that the brain’s frontal lobes, which are crucial for self-control, are not yet mature in adolescents. This finding has helped shape attitudes about whether young people are fully responsible for their actions. In 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, its decision explicitly took into consideration that “parts of the brain involved in behavior control continue to mature through late adolescence.” Similar reasoning is often applied to behavior arising from chemical imbalances in the brain.
