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The First Step Toward a Personal Memory Maker?
Decent memory is a matter of livelihood, of independence, most of all of identity. Human memory is the ghost in the neural machine, a widely distributed, continually changing, multidimensional conversation among cells that can reproduce both the capital of Kentucky and the emotional catacombs of that first romance. The news last week that scientists had developed a brain implant that boosts memory — an implantable “cognitive prosthetic,” in the jargon — should be astounding even to the cynical. App developers probably are already plotting yet another brain-exercise product based on the latest science.
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Medical Professionals Benefit from Self-Directed ‘Job Crafting’
Employees can shape their environments to improve their experience at work and their performance.
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Harvard’s Dr Irene Pepperberg on ‘talking’ whales
Dr Irene Pepperberg, comparative psychologist at Harvard University, discusses talking animals.
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Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research
In 2015, Nick Brown was skimming Twitter when something caught his eye. A tweet mentioned an article by Nicolas Guéguen, a French psychologist with a penchant for publishing titillating findings about human behavior, for example that women with large breasts get more invitations to dance at nightclubs, or blond waitresses get bigger tips. Now, Guéguen was reporting that men are less likely to assist women who tie up their hair. Brown, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, sent an email about the study to James Heathers, a postdoc in behavioral science at Northeastern University in Boston whom he had met a few years earlier.
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Why Trying to Be Less Awkward Never Works
You know that thing where someone is walking toward you, and you move one way but so do they, then you move the other way but so do they, and you repeat this dance until, inevitably, one of you says, “Shall we dance?” Awkward moments like these can be panic-inducing, and judging by the number of books and articles and videos on awkwardness that have popped up in recent years, this is far from a unique worry. So many of these try to help by offering outrageously specific advice. Don’t let a conversational silence last longer than four seconds.
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Why are people prejudiced? The answer is not what you think
People are prejudiced -- sometimes unashamedly so. We tend to have a host of reasons ready to justify our biases -- the mentally ill are dangerous, immigrants steal jobs, the LGBTQ community corrupts family values, Muslims are terrorists and rural whites are uneducated. But these prejudices are largely unfounded and the justifications don't hold water, so what is driving them in the first place? In the December Nature: Human Behavior, we -- with colleagues Julia Marshall and Yimeng Wang -- report a basic root of social prejudice: People's dislike of broken patterns.
