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WATCH: Ben Folds and a surgeon show what happens when music enters the brain
Stat: Earlier this month, Limb joined Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra in an off-the-cuff demonstration of musical creativity and how it comes about in Ben Folds’s brain. STAT then sat down with Folds and Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician, to talk about how Folds thinks about the music that he makes. Read the whole story: Stat
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Meaningless Accelerating Scores Yield Better Performance
From typing to exercising, racking up meaningless digital points can serve as an effective motivator, as long as the scores are accelerating.
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Microaggressions?
Aeon: Across college campuses and the corporate landscape, a big idea has taken hold: the notion that microaggressions – subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at minorities or other powerless people – can lower performance, lead to ostracism, increase anxiety, and sometimes cause so much psychological pain that the recipient might even commit suicide. Yet despite the good intentions and passionate embrace of this idea, there is scant real-world evidence that microaggression is a legitimate psychological concept, that it represents unconscious (or implicit) prejudice, that intervention for it works, or even that alleged victims are seriously damaged by these under-the-radar acts.
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Cracking the Popularity Code
Scientific American: We live in an age obsessed with popularity. Adults spend more and more of their time thinking, and behaving, like high school students. In a new book — called, yes, “Popular” — the psychologist Mitch Prinstein explores popularity with a scientist’s eye. Prinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that there are, in fact, two types of popularity and that we, as a culture, have settled on the more dysfunctional type. There is, he says, a better way. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Puppy Love! How Baby Animal Photos Could Help Your Marriage
Live Science: That "squeee!" you feel when you look at pictures of cute puppies or bunnies might be good for your love life. A new study finds that looking at baby-animal photos may increase couples' levels of satisfaction with their relationships. Researchers found that study participants who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with photos of cute animals or with other pleasant images over a few weeks seemed to see their partners in a more positive light by the end of the study, compared with people who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with other images over the same period.
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A New Look at the Killing of Kitty Genovese: The Science of False Confessions
Kitty Genovese’s murder caught the attention of the public and psychological scientists alike, but new research indicates we’ve had the story all wrong for the last 50 years.
