Mice in the Ivory Tower
Focusing on 10 years of research carried out in mice, Yong-Seok Lee and Alcino Silva in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience article discuss how some mutations (and there are a surprising number of them)...
View ArticleHardest Problems Can Make the Best Teachers
To learn a craft, the rule of thumb is start simple and build up to the more complex components. But surprising new research suggests that, for certain types of skills, the opposite approach works...
View ArticleFor Older Women, Up Side to Body Fat
Given the myriad problems associated with the obesity epidemic, science has not had much good to say about body fat in recent years. But a new paper in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology reports...
View ArticleAdmire Her Body, Hamper Her Brain?
Guys, here’s something to consider the next time you ogle an attractive woman: Your desirous gaze may be reducing her capacity to think. That’s the startling implication of a research paper titled “My...
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American Idolatry: So Bad You Just Gotta Be Good
Here in Williamstown, Mass., where I live, there is a contractor who won’t work with you if you watch shows about construction on HGTV. He simply got fed up with being told how to do his job by people...
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Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes
Can you mentally rotate a three-dimensional object, getting a clear sense of how it looks it from a variety of angles? It’s a specific cognitive skill that has been the subject of much study in recent...
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Sex on the Brain Proves Costly for Men
Ladies: Do you have any idea how much power you have over us men? To quote the classic song, it seems the very thought of you is enough to dull our brains. That’s the conclusion of a research team from...
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Thinking Creatively: Just Add Milk
Want to boost your creativity? Tomorrow morning, pour some milk into an empty bowl, and then add the cereal. That may sound, well, flaky. But according to a newly published study, preparing a common...
View ArticleThe Brain-Focusing Power of the Lab Coat
Schoolchildren grappling with a tough assignment are encouraged to “put your thinking cap on.” But parents and teachers offering this advice may be focusing on the wrong garment. Perhaps students...
View ArticleThinking vs. Knowing: When Facts Get in the Way
Thinking is not easy. It requires effort. Whenever possible, all of us seek to avoid it by replacing it with knowledge. Once we know something — 2+2=4, the trash is collected on Tuesdays, or it takes...
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Music of Vivaldi Boosts Mental Vitality
The Mozart Effect—the notion that listening to certain pieces of classical music can boost one’s brainpower—was initially embraced, widely popularized, and then largely debunked. But like an operatic...
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Mindfulness Training Boosts Test Scores
Studies reporting the benefits of mindfulness training keep rolling in—not quite with the regularity of those distracting thoughts that keep popping up in your head, but at a good clip nonetheless. The...
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Why Chess Should Be Required in U.S. Schools
Rook to B8. Checkmate. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of defeating a worthy opponent in a game of chess: the ultimate battle of the wits. Of course, it’s not a feeling I have very often, since...
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Could Family Longevity Protect Against Dementia?
The sons and daughters of people who live very long lives tend to get the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease later than others, but they’re not immune from the memory-robbing disease, according to a new...
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‘The Internet Made Me Do It’: Stop Blaming Social Media for Our Behavioral...
The Internet is destroying our national parks. That’s according to Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree National Park in California, anyway. Lange spoke to New York Times reporter Felicity...
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To Stay Focused, Listen to Mozart
Score another one for Wolfgang Amadeus. Researchers report the soothing sounds of a Mozart minuet boosts the ability of children and seniors to focus on a task and ignore extraneous information....
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How Did Our Brains Get So Brilliant?
Modern human brains evolved over the last two million years while confronting the survival challenges of African grasslands. So how do our savannah-derived brains perform high-flying cognitive...
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Artificial Intelligence Will Have to Figure Out Which Triangles Are the...
How odd are some even numbers? Are some triangles more "triangular" then others? Why is purple a fruit? These are fairly surrealistic ways to ask about things that are either yes or no. For example,...
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Hand-Wringing Over Handwriting
If you want to gauge in earnest just how divorced education has become from the simple practice of handwriting, here is an experiment. On the first day of a college course in elementary composition,...
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