There is a party in the hotel room next to you. You are beginning to worry about your 8 am keynote address the next morning, and you’d love to tell those folks to quieten down. But how many of them are there? Just 2 or 3? Or more? What if it’s a whole troupe of […]
I am posting this message on behalf of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences: There is a great deal of activity on Capitol Hill right now, and I want to give you an update. In Monday’s newsletter, I wrote articles about two bills affecting NSF funding (see links below). Here’s additional information on […]
When do you look something up, and when do you try to remember it? One of the hallmarks of humans is our ability to store and access information in the environment around us as well as in our own central nervous systems. We have an external memory and an internal memory. Many tasks involve moment-to-moment trade-offs between the two. The “soft […]
When two talking heads are better than two flips of a coin: Social interaction helps team performance Put a few people together on a team and you get teamwork, which Wikipedia lauds as “a means of assuring quality and safety in the delivery of services” in at least some domains. Put a few people together on […]
Stepping right when your next destination is straight ahead: Your ultimate plans guide your navigation now When Christopher Columbus reached the new world, he famously thought he had circumnavigated the globe and landed in India. This may be history’s most famous navigational error but it is far from the only one. Although people are quite good […]
What’s the capital of Burkina Faso? Which bird can fly backwards? What was the first human invention to break the sound barrier? Questions of this type probe what is called “semantic memory”, the repository of our general knowledge, which is known to be organized by meaning rather than by autobiographical cues. For example, you may […]
Like many mental health professional, the UK’s famed National Health Service (NHS) notes that “it can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much. Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing.” This ability to “live in […]