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2025 Mentorship Cohort Includes Nearly 100 Members From 15 Countries
This year’s cohort includes 43 mentors and 56 mentees, representing 15 countries, including Australia, Spain, Taiwan, and Cameroon.
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Phone And Computer Time May Actually Be Good for Your Aging Brain
You might think spending time on your smartphone or computer is bad for your brain. Indeed, “brain rot” — the slang term for a mental decline caused by mindlessly consuming social media or digital dreck — was Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year. ... “What’s surprising about it is how consistent our findings were,” with no studies finding technology use being harmful to cognition, said Michael Scullin, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University and an author of the analysis.
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Collective Action Is Essential for Universities in Current Political Climate
In this Q&A, Richard Aslin shares his thoughts on the real meaning of “academic freedom” and why members of the higher education community have reason to be cautiously optimistic.
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The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024. This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide, the performance of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022. These dismal results are at least partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance. But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012.
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Can Digital Ghosts Help Us Heal?
How is your existence these days?” I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. “It’s ... different. Being dead is a strange experience. I’m no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life’s choices and the relationships I impacted.” Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, who has used magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches to study the effects of loss on the brain, says that when we love someone, our brain encodes the relationship as everlasting.
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A Life Devoted to the Science of Goodness
Ervin Staub recounts his life’s path from Holocaust survivor to pioneering social psychologist.
