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anonymous

How Engaging With Art Affects the Human Brain | American Association for the Advancemen... - 0 views

www.aaas.org/...gaging-art-affects-human-brain

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Today, the neurological mechanisms underlying these responses are the subject of fascination to artists, curators and scientists alike.
  • "Once you circle these little things and come to the end of this little project, you'll be invited to compare where you came out against what the results of this experiment were and are," Vikan said. "What you'll find in this show is that there is an amazing convergence. The people that came to the museum liked and disliked the same categories of shapes as the people in the lab as the people in the fMRIs."
  • "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to project oneself as an agent in the depicted scene,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Embodied cognition is "the sense of drawing you in and making you really feel the quality of the paintings,"
  • The Birth of Venus" because it makes them feel as though they are floating in with Venus on the seashell. Similarly, viewers can feel the flinging of the paint on the canvas when appreciating a drip painting by Jackson Pollock.
  • Mirror neurons, cells in the brain that respond similarly when observing and performing an action, are responsible for embodied cognition
  • Most research on the effects of music education has been done on populations that are privileged enough to afford private music instruction so Kraus is studying music instruction in group settings
  • "But observing the action requires the information to flow inward from the image you're seeing into the control centers. So that bidirectional flow is what's captured in this concept of mirror neurons and it gives the extra vividness to this aesthetics of art appreciation
  • Performing an action requires the information to flow out from the control centers to the limbs,
  • While congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the subjects were taught to draw from memory,
  • Hearing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uniquely skilled. In standardized tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased, Kraus said.
  • Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non-artists. In an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity
  • Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said.
  • "To sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," Kraus said. "Auditory biology is not frozen in time. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."
  • "When you're doing art, your brain is running full speed,"
  • "It's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art,
krystalxu

Developing Communication Language And Literacy Skills Education Essay - 0 views

www.ukessays.com/...acy-skills-education-essay.php

language communication psychology brain science

shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • They need to recognise the role of communication in our society and from birth they need many and varied opportunities for positive interaction, and responses to their attempts to express themselves.
  • Communication, Language and Literacy helps a child to understand relationships, to hear words and sentences.
  • Through their growing knowledge and understanding, children can learn to appreciate the contribution made by many cultures to the development and application of communication, language and literacy.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Children learn different communication, language and literacy skills through a structure of literacy framework that are related to development.
  • The process tries to make children to enjoy communication, language and literacy and be enthusiastic about the learning it .
  • They develop understanding of the correspondence between spoken and written sounds and learn to link sounds and letters and use their knowledge to read and write simple words by sounding out and blending.
  • The development of a national infrastructure is capable of providing ongoing professional development, quality assurance and data collection for the intervention.
  • The observations should be shared with the group to help make improvements in future performances.
  • Observing and encouraging babies and children's use of mirrors for self exploration of facial expression and gesture.
  • At times it can be useful to encourage children to use their home language, for example when organising initial ideas.
  • New buildings should be physically accessible to disabled pupils and will involve improving access to existing buildings including ramps, wider doors, low sinks, etc
  • All opportunities need to be well grounded in positive pride for the styles common in every child's own background. 
sanderk

Council Post: The Seven Key Steps Of Critical Thinking - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...key-steps-of-critical-thinking

critical thinking communication thinking

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • the effort we put into growing our workforce, we often forget the one person who is in constant need of development: ourselves. In particular, we neglect the soft skills that are vital to becoming the best professional possible — one of them being critical thinking.
  • In short, the ability to think critically is the art of analyzing and evaluating data for a practical approach to understanding the data, then determining what to believe and how to act.
  • There are times where an answer just needs to be given and given right now. But that doesn't mean you should make a decision just to make one. Sometimes, quick decisions can fall flat
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  • “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Sometimes, taking a minute to be systematic and follow an organized approach makes all the difference. This is where critical thinking meets problem solving. Define the problem, come up with a list of solutions, then select the best answer, implement it, create an evaluation tool and fine-tune as needed.
  • Evaluate information factually. Recognizing predispositions of those involved is a challenging task at times. It is your responsibility to weigh the information from all sources and come to your own conclusions.
  • Be open-minded and consider all points of view. This is a good time to pull the team into finding the best solution. This point will allow you to develop the critical-thinking skills of those you lead.
  • Communicate your findings and results. This is a crucial yet often overlooked component. Failing to do so can cause much confusion in the organization.
  • Developing your critical-thinking skills is fundamental to your leadership success.
Javier E

What's behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological ph... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pular-psychological-phenomenon

confidence knowledge psychology brain science bias science ignorance incompetence

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.
  • Dunning was shocked by the results, even though it confirmed his hypothesis. Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher. On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
  • Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Dunning-Kruger “offers an explanation for a kind of hubris,” said Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist at Brown University. “The fact is, that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s a man with zero political skill who has no idea he has zero political skill. And it’s given him extreme confidence.”
  • What happens when the incompetent are unwilling to admit they have shortcomings? Are they so confident in their own perceived knowledge that they will reject the very idea of improvement? Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.
  • Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot.
  • the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology
  • “Obviously it has to do with Trump and the various treatments that people have given him,” Dunning said, “So yeah, a lot of it is political. People trying to understand the other side. We have a massive rise in partisanship and it’s become more vicious and extreme, so people are reaching for explanations."
  • Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”
  • the Dunning-Kruger effect has become popular outside of the research world because it is a simple phenomenon that could apply to all of us
  • The ramifications of the Dunning-Kruger effect are usually harmless. If you’ve ever felt confident answering questions on an exam, only to have the teacher mark them incorrect, you have firsthand experience with Dunning-Kruger.
Javier E

Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...so-much-more-than-hearing.html

sense perception hearing listening attention brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense.
  • hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal
  • The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle.
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  • There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain.
  • This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
  • Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes
  • But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.
  • Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.
  • we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics.
  • “You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.
Javier E

Stanford Magazine - History Detected - May/June 2013 - 2 views

alumni.stanford.edu/...article

history pedagogy stanford reading

shared by Javier E on 26 May 13 - No Cached
  • an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country
  • trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.
  • Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress
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  • "Textbooks are useful as background narrative. It's difficult to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution if students don't know where Vietnam is, or the Lincoln-Douglas debates if they don't know who Abe Lincoln was before he was Daniel Day-Lewis.
  • The website's lessons have been downloaded 800,000 times and spawned a lively online community of history educators grateful for the camaraderie
  • just 30 percent of the people who teach history-related courses in U.S. public high schools both majored in the field and are certified to teach it.
  • " By reading these challenging documents and discovering history for themselves, he says, "not only will they remember the content, they'll develop skills for life."
  • Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?
  • But when a ten-pound textbook becomes the script for a whole year's worth of instruction, a precious learning opportunity is lost. "Many students go through their entire middle and high school and never encounter the actual voice of a historical participant,"
  • The Common Core curriculum will bring radical changes in the standardized state tests that youngsters have been taking for decades. Instead of filling in multiple-choice bubbles, they will be expected to write out short answers that demonstrate their ability to analyze texts, and then cite those texts to support arguments—the exact skills that Reading Like a Historian fosters.
  • Wineburg realized that the art of historical thinking is not something that comes naturally to most people; it has to be cultivated. Students have to be taught to look at the source of a document before reading it, figure out the context in which it was written, and cross-check it with other sources before coming to a conclusion.
  • In 2008, Reisman was ready to conduct a test of the curriculum at five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. As expected, students in the test classes showed an increased ability to retain historical knowledge, as well as a greater appreciation for history, compared to the control group. What took everyone by surprise, though, was how much the test students advanced in basic reading.
  • Fremont 11th grader Ayanna Black agrees. "In other history courses I have taken, I wasn't able to fully understand what was going on. It seemed that it was just a bunch of words I had to memorize for a future test," she says. "Now that I contextualize the information I am given, it helps me understand not only what is being said but also the reason behind it." The approach, she says, "leads me to remembering the information out of curiosity, rather than trying to pass a test."
  • Scholars in the Stanford History Education Group hope to develop more online lesson plans in world history
  • Wineburg devoured history books as a kid and did well in Advanced Placement courses at his public high school. But when he entered Brown University, he was shocked at how ill-prepared he was in the subject. Employed after college as a high school history teacher, he saw similar weaknesses in his students. "The best ones could repeat what the text said," he recalls, "but when I asked them to critically examine whether they believed the text, I could have been speaking Martian."
  • Wineburg and his PhD students have teamed up with the library on another project: a website called Beyond the Bubble,where teachers can learn how to evaluate their students using short written tests called History Assessments of Thinking. Each HAT asks students to consider a historical document—a letter drawn from the archives of the NAACP, for example—and justify their conclusions about it in three or four sentences. By scanning the responses, teachers can determine quickly whether their pupils are grasping basic concepts.
  • Wineburg hopes to make Reading Like a Historian lesson plans completely paperless, with exercise sheets that can be filled out on a laptop or tablet computer.
  • Though the work has been hard in history this year, she appreciates what it's taught her. "I've learned that you don't just read what is put in front of you and accept it, which is what I had been doing with my textbook all summer," she explains. "It can be frustrating to analyze documents that are contradictory, but I'm coming to appreciate that history is a collection of thousands of accounts and perspectives, and it's our job to interpret it."
Javier E

The Ignorance Caucus - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-ignorance-caucus.html

evidence critical science research Republicans motivated reasoning knowledge

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
  • even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his ope
  • nness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.
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  • Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how well such treatments work.
  • , Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.”
  • in his home state of Virginia — have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence they don’t like. True, the state has finally agreed to study the growing risk of coastal flooding; Norfolk is among the American cities most vulnerable to climate change. But Republicans in the State Legislature have specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level rise.”
  • the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.
  • while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.
  • for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.
  • It would be helpful to these discussions if we had a good grasp of the facts about firearms and violence. But we don’t, because back in the 1990s conservative politicians, acting on behalf of the National Rifle Association, bullied federal agencies into ceasing just about all research into the issue.
Javier E

History News Network - 0 views

hnn.us/...148833.html

fact-checking democracy rationality education election

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • A myth is a narrative that people tell to express their most basic views about what the world is like and how they should live in it. The myth serves that purpose whether it’s totally false, totally true, or (as is usually the case) some mixture of the two.
  • Fact-checking the myth is irrelevant to its role in the lives of the people who tell it.  They do not judge it by whether it can be proven factually true. Rather, it shapes their view of truth; it tells them what they can accept as factually true and what they must consider false. So they act out their myth in a ritual to reinforce their commitment to truth as the myth teaches them to see it -- or so the old theory goes.
  • What happens when fact-checking itself becomes a ritual? I don’t have quantitative data, but it seems to me that we have much more fact-checking in this presidential election than in any election before
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  • Why is fact-checking so popular? The traditional American view of democracy has a ready answer: The people know that, to be responsible voters, they must know the facts.
  • There’s a complex myth of democracy packed into that little story. There’s a basic premise: Democracy can work because we humans are rational animals. We are built to be fact-checkers; we all have the capacity to separate true facts from lies. And once we have true facts, we know how to analyze them logically to come to reasonable conclusions. If that weren’t true, democracy would be a foolish experiment, indeed.
  • But, the myth goes on to say, a capacity is useless unless it is developed through training. That’s why democracy demands universal access to education
  • Only educated people can be responsible citizens because only the educated have actualized their potential for fact-checking and rational thinking.
  • When the final book is written on this campaign, one-sided deception will still have played a central role. As it stands, the very notions of fact and truth are employed in American politics as much to distort as to reveal. And until the voting public demands something else, not just from the politicians they oppose but also from the ones they support, there is little reason to suspect that will change.
  • they must have honesty from their leaders and transparency from their government.
  • Hence, the need for fact-checkers at every step on the campaign trail. It’s only logical.Except that there’s no evidence all the fact-checking has any measurable impact on the voters’ choices.
  • ideas hardly mattered any more than facts in the outcome of the first debate. Romney won on style points alone.
  • The “theater state” is a performance art. Every candidate is judged, above all, on their performance. Good theatrical performers know how to create satisfying illusory images of truth. It’s one of their highest skills. Mitt Romney proved that in the first debate.
  • The myth of democracy says that citizens must educated enough to know which policies are best for their community. But good citizens must also bring their rationality into the polling booth.
  • The fact-checkers, too, are seasoned performers skilled in the art of creating satisfying illusory images of truth.
  • Above all, they create the illusion that American democracy is alive and well because the public is apparently being informed of the facts and the veracity of each candidate is apparently being carefully evaluated and widely reported. Fact-checking, then, is the ritual enactment of our myth of democracy. As long as the myth keeps getting acted out, we can trust that it is alive and well.
lenaurick

Why your brain loves procrastination - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...stination-psychology-help-stop

science research psychology knowledge technology

shared by lenaurick on 24 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives.
  • Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.
  • Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.
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  • For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves — an insight that points to ways to help.
  • But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.
  • they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.
  • I used to procrastinate, and now I don't, because I got all these wicked strategies. And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive.
  • Whenever we face a task, we’re not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I’m not in the mood." Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."
  • We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that’s going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.
  • mplementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.
  • OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.
  • We [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."
  • Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives
  • Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.
  • Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.
  • But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.
  • Recently we’ve been doing research that relates to the work on "present self"/"future self" because what’s happening with procrastination is that "present self" is always trumping "future self."
  • He’s shown that in experimental settings if someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they’re more likely to allocate funds to retirement. When [the researchers] did the fMRI studies, they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.
  • The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.
  • e [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."
  • Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."
  • Implementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.
  • Because it’s all about self-deception — you aren’t aware that it’s going to cost you, but you are.
  • OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.
  • And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive
mcginnisca

Why Do We Teach Girls That It's Cute to Be Scared? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hat-its-cute-to-be-scared.html

psychology gender bias education brain science

shared by mcginnisca on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?
  • Apparently, fear is expected of women.
  • parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But both moms and dads directed their sons to face their fears, with instruction on how to complete the task on their own.
  • Misadventures meant that I should try again. With each triumph over fear and physical adversity, I gained confidence.
  • She said that her own mother had been very fearful, gasping at anything remotely rough-and-tumble. “I had been so discouraged from having adventures, and I wanted you to have a more exciting childhood,”
  • arents are “four times more likely to tell girls than boys to be more careful”
  • “Girls may be less likely than boys to try challenging physical activities, which are important for developing new skills.” This study points to an uncomfortable truth: We think our daughters are more fragile, both physically and emotionally, than our sons. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Nobody is saying that injuries are good, or that girls should be reckless. But risk taking is important
  • It follows that by cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are failing to prepare them for life.
  • When a girl learns that the chance of skinning her knee is an acceptable reason not to attempt the fire pole, she learns to avoid activities outside her comfort zone.
  • Fear becomes a go-to feminine trait, something girls are expected to feel and express at will.
  • By the time a girl reaches her tweens no one bats an eye when she screams at the sight of an insect.
  • When girls become women, this fear manifests as deference and timid decision making
  • We must chuck the insidious language of fear (Be careful! That’s too scary!) and instead use the same terms we offer boys, of bravery and resilience. We need to embolden girls to master skills that at first appear difficult, even dangerous. And it’s not cute when a 10-year-old girl screeches, “I’m too scared.”
  • I was often scared. Of course I was. So were the men.
sissij

Fake Academe, Looking Much Like the Real Thing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-much-like-the-real-thing.html

new york times social media education

shared by sissij on 31 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure.
  • sissij on 31 Dec 16
     
    Academe is losing its meaning now because the society only sees how many journals you have published but not what you actually write in the journals. I think the growing business of academic publication fraud reflects that our society values our certificates more than our skills. The numerous articles on those "good" colleges also put pressure on teenagers and parent that a title means all. However, that shouldn't be core of education. There is never a shortcut to success. --Sissi (12/31/2016)
Javier E

The Power of 'Why?' and 'What If?' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-power-of-why-and-what-if.html

critical thinking question

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • the act of formulating questions enables us “to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.” This makes questioning a good skill to hone in dynamic times.
  • Asking questions can help spark the innovative ideas that many companies hunger for these days
  • By the time we’re in the workplace, many of us have gotten out of the habit of asking fundamental questions about what’s going on around us. And some people worry that asking questions at work reveals ignorance or may be seen as slowing things down.
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  • question formulation exercises can be used as a substitute for conventional brainstorming sessions. The idea is to put a problem or challenge in front of a group of people and instead of asking for ideas, instruct participants to generate as many relevant questions as they can. Kristi Schaffner, an executive at Microsoft, regularly conducts such exercises there and says they sharpen analytical skills.
sissij

Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...neral-motors-stock-market.html

new york times tesla science

shared by sissij on 04 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.
  • “Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”
  • Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his California-based company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But neither automaker has convinced Wall Street that it has shed its boom-or-bust reputation tied to broader economic cycles, or is at the forefront of new technology being developed for self-driving vehicles and electric cars.
  • “It’s almost like Tesla is positioned in people’s minds as an energy storage company that happens to put most of its batteries on wheels,” said Andrew Stewart, chief investment officer at Exchange Capital Management, an investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.
  • While Tesla may enjoy the favor of investors, it still faces some daunting hurdles to reach its goals.
  • sissij on 04 Apr 17
     
    In my research on Tesla, I found it very interesting that Tesla never has advertisement spreading out like Ford, Motor or other motor companies do. Yet, it is very popular and well-known. How does Tesla manage to be known by the public if they don't have any advertisement and their target costumers are the elites? One of the reason I found online about its propaganda strategy is its skill on giving stock holder confidence. Thus their stock price is always positive and healthy. By generating new ideas, Tesla is able to stay on the headline of the newspaper. When I saw this news, my first reaction is that it's Tesla again and give me a very positive image on the future of Tesla. This new way of propaganda is directly related to the new form of economics in the society so I found it very interesting. --Sissi (4/4/2017)
Javier E

What Is College For? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-is-college-for

university school purpose culture intellectual Education

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.”
  • there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.
  • This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.
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  • First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding
  • When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education
  • Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society
  • This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching
  • Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 12 - Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 05 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
julia rhodes

The Primate Brain Likes to Win, But Can't Always Have It | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...-likes-win-cant-always-have-it

primate brain psychology science research knowledge brain science

shared by julia rhodes on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Winning stimulates dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Just watching competition stimulates these happy chemicals through our mirror neurons.
  • Happy chemicals are stimulated by behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature.
  •  Dopamine is the good feeling of getting a reward the meets your needs.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Once he gets the fruit, his dopamine stops. The good feeling will be gone as soon as it's metabolized. To get more, he will have to do more.  Natural selection produced a brain that feels good when it works toward a goal.
  • The monkey's brain weighs the evidence based on past experience. The fruit he scored in the past triggered dopamine that paved neural pathways and trigger his dopamine today. But the pain of past setbacks built cortisol pathways that alert him to the risk of setbacks today.
  • Your brain evolved to stimulate them by takig action to meet your needs. Just taking steps toward skill building gets your happy chemicals flowing once you've built the circuits that kick-start the process.
  • different kind of motivation comes from serotonin. Let's say our monkey's fruit is snatched by a bigger, stronger monkey when he finally gets to the top of the tree. Experience has taught him that bigger monkeys cause pain, and falling from a tree causes pain.
  • A surge of serotonin causes this feeling. Experience teaches a monkey to determine when he is in the superior position and when he is in the inferior position.
  • These words horrify us in today's culture, but a monkey would starve to death if it always saw itself as inferior. It has to feel confident to go for it some of the time. Serotonin creates that confidence.
  • You may say that monkeys should cooperate, share the bananas, or leave the bananas for the needy. By saying these things, you mark yourself as a superior person in today's society. You are just seeking serotonin in the modern way. You stimulate oxytocin when your self-restraint helps you belong
  •  Oxytocin causes the good feeling of social solidarity, and low oxytocin warns your inner mammal that you're in immediate danger. Our brains are constantly aware of potential threats to our social bonds. Competition can threaten your bonds, but it can also strengthen them. Superior skills can bring recognition that reassures you of social acceptance and belonging. Secure social bonds feel good because they stimulate oxytocin.
  • Your inner mammal is always looking for ways to stimulate your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.
  • Your mirror neurons stimulate dopamine when you see other people get rewards
Javier E

Computers Jump to the Head of the Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-to-the-head-of-the-class.html

future scenario technocracy

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Tokyo University, known as Todai, is Japan’s best. Its exacting entry test requires years of cramming to pass and can defeat even the most erudite. Most current computers, trained in data crunching, fail to understand its natural language tasks altogether. Ms. Arai has set researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, where she works, the task of developing a machine that can jump the lofty Todai bar by 2021. If they succeed, she said, such a machine should be capable, with appropriate programming, of doing many — perhaps most — jobs now done by university graduates.
  • A recent study published by the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, at Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, predicted that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by computers over the next two decades.
  • Intelligent machines could be used to replace expensive human resources, potentially undermining the economic value of much vocational education, Ms. Arai said.
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  • “Educational investment will not be attractive to those without unique skills,” she said. Graduates, she noted, need to earn a return on their investment in training: “But instead they will lose jobs, replaced by information simulation. They will stay uneducated.” In such a scenario, high-salary jobs would remain for those equipped with problem-solving skills, she predicted. But many common tasks now done by college graduates might vanish.
  • Over the next 10 to 20 years, “10 percent to 20 percent pushed out of work by A.I. will be a catastrophe,” she says. “I can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean — way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if A.I. performs well in the future.”
  • There is a significant danger, Ms. Arai says, that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, if not well managed, could lead to a radical restructuring of economic activity and the job market, outpacing the ability of social and education systems to adjust.
  • Smart machines will give companies “the opportunity to automate many tasks, redesign jobs, and do things never before possible even with the best human work forces,” according to a report this year by the business consulting firm McKinsey.
  • Advances in speech recognition, translation and pattern recognition threaten employment in the service sectors — call centers, marketing and sales — precisely the sectors that provide most jobs in developed economies.
  • Gartner’s 2013 chief executive survey, published in April, found that 60 percent of executives surveyed dismissed as “‘futurist fantasy” the possibility that smart machines could displace many white-collar employees within 15 years.
  • Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, told a conference in October: “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”
  • Optimists say this could lead to the ultimate elimination of work — an “Athens without the slaves” — and a possible boom for less vocational-style education. Mr. Brant’s hope is that such disruption might lead to a system where individuals are paid a citizen stipend and be free for education and self-realization. “This optimistic scenario I call Homo Ludens, or ‘Man, the Player,’ because maybe we will not be the smartest thing on the planet after all,” he said. “Maybe our destiny is to create the smartest thing on the planet and use it to follow a course of self-actualization.”
charlottedonoho

Do you see what I see? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-seeing-through-others-eyes-do

linguistics multilingualism brain science

shared by charlottedonoho on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • HUMAN beings are not born with the knowledge that others possess minds with different contents. Children develop such a “theory of mind” gradually, and even adults have it only imperfectly. But a study by Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman at the University of Chicago, published in Psychological Science, finds that bilingual children, and also those simply exposed to another language on a regular basis, have an edge at the business of getting inside others’ minds.
  • This study joins a heap of others suggesting that there are cognitive advantages to being bilingual. Researchers have found that bilinguals have better executive function (control over attention and the planning of complex tasks). Those that suffer dementia begin to do so, on average, almost five years later than monolinguals. Full bilinguals had previously been shown to have better theory-of-mind skills. But this experiment is the first to demonstrate that such benefits also accrue to those merely exposed to other languages.
  • It has become fashionable to consider multilingualism as a kind of elite mental training. The question is not settled, though, for many studies have not been successfully replicated. Nor is it yet clear precisely which kinds of language skills and exposure make people better at exactly which tasks.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While some advantages, such as lack of dementia, appear late in life, others may appear early only to disappear thereafter. Research on multilingual minds is, itself, still in a kind of adolescence, but it is a promising one
Javier E

Guess Who Doesn't Fit In at Work - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-doesnt-fit-in-at-work.html

recruiting hiring psychology job fitness culture values discrimination diversity bias

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • ACROSS cultures and industries, managers strongly prize “cultural fit” — the idea that the best employees are like-minded.
  • One recent survey found that more than 80 percent of employers worldwide named cultural fit as a top hiring priority.
  • When done carefully, selecting new workers this way can make organizations more productive and profitable.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.
  • The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.
  • in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing
  • While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.
  • Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with
  • To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “
  • Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”
  • interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not
  • it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.
  • Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low
  • In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.
  • Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds
  • Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.
  • Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.
  • Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.
  • For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.
  • First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.
  • But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down
summertyler

A guide to raising bilingual children - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

bilingual cnn psychology language

shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Simone's mom reads, sings and talks to him in French.
  • The goal? To raise him to be bilingual.
  • If you've ever thought about raising your kid to be multilingual, now's the perfect time to start. "Babies are wired for language,"
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "The earlier they're introduced to a second language, the easier it will be for them to pick it up." Knowing a second (or third!) language could one day give your child an edge in an increasingly global workforce.
  • tend to have superior reading and writing skills in both languages, as well as better analytical and academic skills,
  • "Learning a language is a question of repeated high-quality exposure,"
  • "If a family reads a book to their child in Spanish as part of a bedtime routine, that's a lot of reading and a lot of learning over an extended period of time."
  • What you can expect: Results range from recognizing the language when it's spoken to being able to converse casually. The more time the child spends with the nanny or in bilingual daycare, the greater the proficiency. "It all depends on the amount and quality of the child's exposure,"
  • What you can expect: A bilingual tot, in time. Don't worry if he doesn't speak either language as adeptly as his monolingual peers at first. If your child is exposed to both languages the same amount, he will be able to speak both equally well by the time he goes to school.
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    Language can help a child advance in school. This is an example of language not creating barriers, but actually helping a person.
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