Psychology
The financial toll of autism - Apr. 2
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Raising an autistic child can take a tremendous financial toll, even when insurance helps cover some of the costs. Kim and David Picciano's three-year old son, Colton, was diagnosed with autism eight months ago and they pay roughly $1,000 out of pocket each month for all of his therapies. "It's not all covered... we have co-pays," said Kim. "Right now, I've been fighting with insurance since August to get him occupational therapy."
“Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” b y Sam Sommers
To give weight to his argument, Sommers offers evidence from numerous experiments. For example, an adrenaline-filled chance encounter engineered by psychologists to take place between a man and a beautiful woman on a rickety suspension bridge led to greater attraction than a similar meeting on a sturdier bridge. (Planners of first dates take note: To make a lasting connection, a horror film may be a better bet than a comedy.) More disturbing are his examples of how being part of a crowd can lead us to apathy, or to fail to lend a helping hand. This has had fatal results, such as when 38 bystanders witnessed 2-year-old British toddler James Bulger being beaten and dragged around town by two sadistic 10-year-olds who later murdered him. In crowds, we are less likely to act independently, assuming someone else will step up.
"Most of us consider ourselves to be objective, consistent people who make decisions that reflect our core principles, no matter what the situation. In “Situations Matter,” psychology professor Sam Sommers throws this common-sense notion out the window. Our environments are actually much more powerful than we think."
Looks at it from a more social perspective, than a theoretical perspective. I'm personally more interested in how knowing the context of certain facts changes our perception of the fact and (possibly) our worldview. by Feb 6
Quiet, Please: Unleashing 'The Power Of Introverts'
By Marc Parry New York Jonathan Haidt is occupying Wall Street. Sort of. It's a damp and bone-chilling January night in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.
Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics - The Chronicle Review
Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong
Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite of the best strategies for learning.
Experimental data to back this up? by Jan 30
The human brain doesn’t really forget anything. It’s just unable to retrieve it. ““Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork. “Imagine you remembered all the phone numbers of all the houses you had ever lived in. When someone asks you your current phone number, you would have to sort it from this long list.” Instead, we forget the old phone numbers, or at least bury them far beneath the ease of recall we gift to our current number. What you thought were sworn enemies are more like distant collaborators.” by Jan 30
"If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”
Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard." by Jan 30
"Bjork explains that successful interleaving allows you to “seat” each skill among the others: “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful,” he says. There’s one caveat: Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you’re trying to learn tennis, you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork — not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java." by Jan 30
Are smart people ugly? The Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year
Jean-Paul Sartre and Socrates were known for their brains and not their looks — at least not the good kind Illlustration by Charlie Powell. It's been a few weeks since we posted the questions that the Explainer was either unwilling or unable to answer in 2011. Among this year's batch of imponderables were inquiries like, Are the blind sleepy all the time ?
It's not that beautiful people are especially smart, she says, so much as that ugly people are especially dumb.
Why might intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand? There are a few different theories. First, it might be that some common genetic factor produces both smarts and beauty. Or maybe there's a combination of genes that make people both dumb and ugly. Kanazawa thinks it's the former, arguing that intelligent men have tended to rise to the top of the social hierarchy and select beautiful women as their mates. Their offspring, contra George Bernard Shaw's supposed quip, would have had both traits together. by Jan 30
7 Must-Read Books on Music, Emotion & the Brain
by Maria Popova What Freud has to do with auditory cheesecake, European opera and world peace. Last year, Horizon’s fascinating documentary on how music works was one of our most-liked pickings of 2010. But perhaps even more fascinating than the subject of how music works is the question of why it makes us feel the way it does. Today, we try to answer it with seven essential books that bridge music, emotion and cognition, peeling away at that tender intersection of where your brain ends and your soul begins.
Video: Steve Silberman, author of "The Geek Syndrome," speaks about autism and Silicon Valley
Join our free support community and connect with thousands of other families and individuals touched by ASD. Find out what’s working for others, coping strategies, and life guides from others living what you’re going through now. Click here to join for free!
Nancy Bistritz is senior director at Nurun where she is responsible for marketing and communications initiatives in the U.S. You can follow Nurun on Twitter at @NurunUSA and read its blog at digitalforreallife.com . We’ve all been there before. You’re out having what you think is a nice meal with someone, and then the inevitable happens: the vibration on the table that can’t be ignored.
Why Multitasking May Make You Less Productive
How to Save an Unproductive Day in 25 Minutes
1) Carve out a time oasis
2) Note your progress for the day
3) Set up progress for tomorrow by Dec 9
Parenting changes during the last 30 years.
I always find it amusing when people talk nostalgically about “the good old days” when arguing that today’s generation is “ out of control.” ” Today’s kids are so violent… When I was a kid I would have never gotten away with that!, ” I hear often. The argument is that today’s youth are out of control because parents do not parent anymore and parental expectations have declined.Author argues that no, parenting has not gotten softer over the years by Nov 19
Is SpongeBob bad for kids? Give the show a break
SpongeBob’s effect on kids’ brains - The Checkup
Top ten myths about introverts - Jerry Brito - StumbleUpon
Free Will Debate: Who’s in Charge? by Michael Gazzaniga (review)
Summary cont.:
"The reason for this is that the left brain works with whatever becomes conscious, but consciousness is the ultimate slow poke. It lags behind. It’s walking while the non-conscious brain is sprinting to the finish line, processing what’s happening around us, making a decision about how to respond, even beginning to execute that response. Our conscious awareness is the last to find out.
So what “the interpreter” narrates is necessarily after the fact.
The brain, composed of all kinds of decentralized circuits that work in tandem, has no central command center.
It’s no longer useful to ponder the question of free will as such because neuroscience has changed the very meaning of the question. Accordingly, the mind develops ideas and beliefs that then influence the brain, which in turn influences the mind. It’s a constant back and forth. It’s dynamic.” by Nov 19
Summary:
“Years of this kind of research led Gazzaniga to be able to characterize the differences between the left brain and the right brain. The right, he says, “lives a literal life.” It doesn’t extrapolate, it doesn’t narrate, it doesn’t generalize. It registers in an exact, concrete fashion what’s going on around it.
The left hemisphere plays a different role. It’s our resident storyteller. “The left hemisphere was the intellectual,” Gazzaniga discovered. It is our brain’s “interpreter.”
It’s the left brain that spins a narrative out of all the disconnected bits of information swimming up into our conscious view. The funny thing, however, is that the stories the left brain produces are largely if not entirely wrong.” by Nov 19