Why Silence Is So Good For Your Brain | Huffington Post - 0 views
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We live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by — and that may be negatively affecting our health.
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World Health Organization report called noise pollution a “modern plague,”
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overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population.”
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What's the Best Music to Listen to While Working? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Worse yet is the possibility that the constant soundtrack is poisoning my writing, with the lyrics somehow weaving into and scrambling my thoughts before they ever hit the keyboard. I try to tune it out, but after all, I’m still, I’m still an animal!
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It turns out the best thing to listen to, for most office workers, is nothing.
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An early study called “Music—an aid to productivity,” appropriately found that music could be just that. But the study subjects in that experiment were doing rote factory work, examining metal parts on conveyor belts.
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It's surprising to see that not all music can improve our work quality. Many people always ask for some music while they are going their work, but they don't know that this could mess up their work and concentration. This reminds me of the attention blindness that we have. We are incapable of multi-tasking. The experiment mentioned in this article is also very interesting because it reflects how we interpret the result based on our favor. Even the conclusion we draw from the science evidences could be wrong. This is an example of the sound argument but invalid conclusion. --Sissi (12/10/2016)
The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views
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The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
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But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
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This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
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Social media stirs fear at Salesianum - 1 views
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A verbal comment made by a Salesianum School student was fanned across social media stirring enough concern that some parents pulled their children out of classes Monday, and left the student explaining what he meant to legal authorities
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"My understanding is that he did give sort of a time-frame," she said. "You never know."
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he removed her son because she felt there were too many distractions.
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How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy - The New York Times - 0 views
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The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.
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Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.
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Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.
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Who Needs Math? - The Monkey Cage - 1 views
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by Larry Bartels on April 9, 2013
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“When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward.” At that point, he suggests finding a collaborator
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But technical expertise in itself is of little avail: ”The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail. Possibly no more than 10% have any lasting value. Only those linked solidly to knowledge of real living systems have much chance of being used.”
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Living in the Material World - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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on a visit to the Academy of Sciences in Almaty some years ago I was presented with a souvenir meant to assure me that Central Asia was indeed still producing philosophy worthy of note. It was a collectively authored book entitled “The Development of Materialist Dialectics in Kazakhstan,” and I still display it proudly on my shelf. Its rough binding and paper bespeak economic hardship. It is packed with the traces of ideas, yet everything about the book announces its materiality.I had arrived in the Kazakh capital 1994, just in time to encounter the last of a dying breed: the philosopher as party functionary (they are all by now retired, dead or defenestrated, or have simply given up on what they learned in school). The book, written by committee, was a collection of official talking points, and what passed for conversation there was something much closer to recitation.
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The philosophical meaning of materialism may in the final analysis be traced back to a religious view of the world. On this view, to focus on the material side of existence is to turn away from the eternal and divine. Here, the category of the material is assimilated to that of sin or evil.
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Yet in fact this feature of Marxist philosophical classification is one that, with some variations, continues to be shared by all philosophers, even in the West, even today
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The Benefits of Bilingualism - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
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in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
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the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
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Silence Is Golden - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,
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“Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”
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or a long time, art provided the boundary for silence, “but now art, in some cases, is so distracting and intense and faceted, it’s hard to step into a moment. Especially when you’re always carrying a microcamera and a screen all the time, both recording and playing back constantly rather than allowing moments of composition and stillness when your brain can go into a reverie.
Silicon Valley Worries About Addiction to Devices - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others listened to or participated
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they debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.
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Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction. But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal. “They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’ ” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”
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The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key to Social Mobility - Andrew Sim... - 1 views
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She’d been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.
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When administrators, counselors, and teachers repeat again and again that a college degree will alleviate economic hardship, they don’t mean to suggest that there is no other point to higher education.
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educators risk distracting them from the others, emphasizing the value of the fruits of their academic labor and skipping past the importance of the labor itself. The message is that intellectual curiosity plays second fiddle to financial security.
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Breathing In vs. Spacing Out - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been published since 2005.
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Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas Tech University, used functional M.R.I.’s before and after participants spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving.
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Perhaps that is why mindfulness has proved beneficial to prospective graduate students. In May, the journal Psychological Science published the results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness made significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam — a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple items of attention.
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The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping.
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Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing
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Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
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What Machines Can't Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.
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what human skills will be more valuable?
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In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.
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University of California - Science Today | How the brain functions during visual searches - 0 views
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task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers -- despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations -- still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search.
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"Our daily lives are comprised of little searches that are constantly changing, depending on what we need to do," said Miguel Eckstein, UC Santa Barbara professor of psychological and brain sciences. "So the idea is, where does that take place in the brain?"
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What Eckstein and co-authors wanted to determine was how we decide whether the target object we are looking for is actually in the scene, how difficult the search is, and how we know we've found what we wanted.
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Belief Is the Least Part of Faith - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident?
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These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions.
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The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.
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What's Lost as Handwriting Fades - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.
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When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write
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By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.
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The Drugs of Work-Performance Enhancement - Steven Petrow - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Adderall makes everything easier to understand; it makes you more alert and focused. Some college students scarf them like M&Ms and think they’re more effective at cognitive enhancement than energy drinks and safer than a smoke or a beer.
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4.4 percent of the adult U.S. population has ADHD, which if left untreated is associated with significant morbidity, divorce, employment, and substance abuse.
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When she asked me why I needed it, I replied just as the college kids had on 60 Minutes: “For focus.”
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How Technology Can Help Language Learning | Suren Ramasubbu - 0 views
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Intelligence, according to Gardner, is of eight types - verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic; existential and moral intelligence were added as afterthoughts in the definition of Intelligence. This is the first in a series of posts that explore and understand how each of the above forms of intelligence is affected by technology-mediated education.
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Verbal-linguistic Intelligence involves sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn languages, and the capacity to use language to accomplish goals. Such intelligence is fostered by three specific activities: reading, writing and interpersonal communication - both written and oral.
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Technology allows addition of multisensory elements that provide meaningful contexts to facilitate comprehension, thus expanding the learning ground of language and linguistics.
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