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How to Rekindle Your Love of Reading
The staff at my local library are usually a convivial bunch, but when I asked them about a recent report that fewer people were reading for fun, they grew subdued. ... Elizabeth A.L. Stine-Morrow, a professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said she used to be reluctant to reread books — “because I wasn’t ‘making progress,’ whatever that was.” But that was a mistake, she said; it’s often on the second reading that you can really see the big picture of what the book is about.
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The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A
... At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades. Resisting the trend was hard. Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments.
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Small, Easy Acts of Joy Mean Big Gains in Happiness
... Our research began as a spin-off from a film called Mission: Joy—Finding Happiness in Troubled Times, in which the 14th Dalai Lama and the late archbishop Desmond Tutu talked about their friendship and offered lessons on creating joy for oneself and others regardless of circumstances. The film’s producer and co-director Peggy Callahan and impact producer Jolene Smith teamed up with psychologists Elissa Epel and one of us (Simon-Thomas) to develop a meaningful way for people to act on the film’s messages.
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‘Gray Rocking’ Is A Way To Deal With Difficult People
... It could be a reasonable strategy to “be a gray rock” when dealing with someone you interact with only occasionally, such as an annoying neighbor or co-worker,“but when there is a narcissist in your house, that’s different,” said Sandra Graham-Bermann, the director of the Child Resilience and Trauma Lab and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Michigan. In situations where you don’t feel unsafe but do have to interact with a difficult person, the gray rock method is “just good advice on how you manage” them, Graham-Bermann said. “You don’t give extra attention; limit your engagement and protect yourself.”
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These Stunning Images Show Every Nerve in a Mouse
Your peripheral nervous system (PNS) is crucial to navigating daily life. It lets you walk, controls your eye movements, and rings your brain’s alarms when you step on a Lego brick. Yet researchers have never built a complete map of this essential network in any mammalian body. Now a study published in Cell shows a complete, three-dimensional map of every single nerve fiber threading through a mouse. It completes the first-ever mammalian “connectome,” a flowchart of an entire nervous system, beyond just the well-researched brain and spinal cord.
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Why We Should Thank Pigeons For Our AI Breakthroughs
... If computers can do all that with just a pigeonlike brain, some animal researchers are now wondering if actual pigeons deserve more credit than they’re commonly given. “When considered in light of the accomplishments of AI, the extension of associative learning to purportedly more complicated forms of cognitive performance offers fresh prospects for understanding how biological systems may have evolved,” Ed Wasserman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, wrote in a recent study in the journal Current Biology.
