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At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.

"Ignoring our history doesn’t make it go away. It always ends up bubbling back up to the top at some point," Allen said. "It may be squished down for a while but it will always come up in different ways."

This  move prompted new academic programs at the university and, according to at least one advocate, served as a tipping point in the national trend toward confronting shameful pasts.

The difficulty of knowing other people’s intent is a classic philosophical problem. It is epistemological in that it involves the limits of our knowledge. We can’t really know what anyone else hopes to do, and sometimes, because of the subconscious and self-deception, we don’t ever know what our own true intent is. It is also an example of the problem of other minds. We can never really enter into the perspective of any other person nor can we ever really know what they think (or even if they think). We are discrete individuals and communication is unreliable. My point: the political and economic realities of running from gun activists is, yet again, founded on classic philosophical issues, and when we take positions on issues of the day, we are really taking positions philosophically. The gun-rights activists think that their intent is obvious and that everyone knows what they hope to do. They believe their minds are transparent. But this is because they are all extreme narcissists. It baffles them that we don’t all know exactly what they are thinking. It shocks them that we don’t know that Jim is a good guy, and that Sally would never murder anyone. But they are wrong. We don’t know them and we don’t know how they think. The only thing that makes us notice them at all is that they have guns and truthfully, that’s why they carry them in the first place. They want to be celebrities, heroes, and the centers of attention.

"Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. ... Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways." Geary further unpacks metaphor's influence in his foreword: "Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."

The upshot of the boom in metaphor studies, Geary makes clear, is the overturning of that presumption toward literalism: Nowadays, it's believers in a literalism that goes all the way down (so to speak) who are on the defensive in intellectual life, and explorers of metaphor who are on the ascendant. As a result, Geary hardly feels a need to address literalism, devoting most of his book to how metaphor connects to etymology, money, mind, politics, pleasure, science, children, the brain, the body, and such literary forms as the proverb and aphorism.

We all resist changing our beliefs about the world, but what happens when some of those beliefs are based on misinformation? Is there a right way to correct someone when they believe something that's wrong?

Too often, argue Lewandowsky and Cook, communicators assume a 'deficit model' in their interactions with the misinformed. This is the idea that we have the right information, and all we need to do to make people believe is to somehow "fill in" the deficit in other people's understanding. Just telling people the evidence for the truth will be enough to replace their false beliefs. Beliefs don't work like that.

AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.

The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.

“Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion?,” Frere-Jones asked. “No movie review begins, ‘Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in The Iron Lady.’” So the question remains: Why do music fans obsess about authenticity? What’s at stake when a fan argues, with emotions riding high, that Taylor Swift is too pop to be country, or that Green Day isn’t authentic punk rock? As a sociologist who studies music, I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand these authenticity debates—which, incidentally, span just about every style of 20th- and 21st-century music, from electronic dance to South Texas polka. And what I’ve learned is that, if you want to understand why authenticity disputes occur, it’s best to look first at when they do.

“Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” from Science This paper isn’t really a study; it’s the outcome of an important movement in the field of psychology. In an effort called the Reproducibility Project, researchers at dozens of universities collaborated to replicate a hundred psychology studies that were initially conducted in 2008. They ended up replicating between a third and half of the studies. Is that result bad or good? It’s inevitable that studies won’t always be replicable—if every study could be replicated, then every researcher would be right the first time; even legitimate findings can prove fragile when you try to repeat them. All the same, the paper concludes that there is “room for improvement” in psychology, especially when it comes to “cultural practices in scientific communication.” Specifically, the authors propose that “low-power research designs combined with publication bias favoring positive results together produce a literature with upwardly biased effect sizes.” In other words, the desire for novelty drives researchers to overestimate the conclusiveness of their own work. It’s a fascinating and valuable effort to make sure that psychology moves forward in the best way possible.

There are precedents for such reclaiming—pejorative words like “queer” and even “slut,” for instance, which their targets have taken over and brandished with pride. But maybe a more apt comparison would be the word “nerd.” “Nerd” used to be a put-down—and it used to cover boys more often than girls. Like “bossy,” it wasn’t really that harsh, but it wasn’t nice, either. It actually had a gender dimension, too, because it called out brainy boys who were not athletic or aggressive. It was a dis of boys who lived in their heads and wore pocket protectors and ate their lunch indoors, playing chess. Just as “bossy” might be said to undermine female leadership, “nerd” might be said to have undermined male intellectualism. But now “nerd,” and its close cousin “geek,” are words that lots of people are happy to identify with, humble-bragging about their obsessive expertise. Brainiac techies can get rich these days, and that has helped spiff up the image of nerdery. John Green, an author of young-adult novels, and his brother Hank have developed a thriving online and off-line community of “nerdfighters,” girls as well as boys, who like to say that they fight for good with their brains and hearts, calculators and trombones. They have heartthrobs like the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. They find each other on Tumblr.

It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.

The Forum @ CERN: A Leap of Faith: Finding Common Ground Between Science and Theology. Promoting a dialogue between science and religion has long been a challenging task- the two communities of thought often seem far apart. The Forum explores the challenge in a discussion recorded at CERN in Switzerland and asks not only why this dialogue is important but how it is working and where it might lead. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universeWith Bridget Kendall to discuss common ground between science and religion are:Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a German particle physicist and the Director General of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, since 2009.Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College who specialises in cosmology, nonlinear physics and astrobiology. Dr. Kusum Jain, a renowned Indian scholar of Jain Philosophy and Director of the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has published extensively on such topics as human rights, the roots of terrorism, and bio-ethics.Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, Head of Science and Faith, Vatican City State.And there is poetry, especially written for the programme, by British poet Murray Lachlan Young.

Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described a method for implanting false memories, not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modelled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation. Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

For almost all her life, Verda Byrd has lived as a black women. She was raised by black parents, married a black man, attended black churches, and even frequented black hair salons. But two years ago, she learned from her adoption papers that she was actually white.  Verda was legally born Jeanette Beagle, daughter to a poor white woman named Daisy Beagle, who struggled to raise several kids in the 1940's.  She was put into a children's home after her biological mother was injured in an accident. A few years later, Jeanette was adopted by a black couple  — and she became Verda.  Although her adopted parents told Verda she wasn't biologically theirs, they never told her that she was white. The discovery prompted Verda to reunite with her biological sisters. Through the reconnection, she learned that her perspective of race was far different from theirs. 

“It’s a parallel to what the tobacco industry did,” Mike Moore told me. “They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have.” He added, “You know what’s going to happen. You’re going to see lots and lots of death.” In May, several members of Congress wrote to the World Health Organization, urging it to help stop the spread of OxyContin, and mentioning the Sackler family by name. “The international health community has a rare opportunity to see the future,” they wrote. “Do not allow Purdue to walk away from the tragedy they have inflicted on countless American families simply to find new markets and new victims elsewhere.”