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To the untrained eye, play can seem aimless, repetitive, wild or foolish. But play can offer a window into the developing mind. Piaget viewed certain kinds of play as milestones, signs that a child had reached a new stage of development.

nstead of simply making objects move through space, they begin to make believe. A banana might become a telephone and a pencil might take flight like an airplane.

That is, the ones who could imagine hypotheticals that hadn’t occurred were also the best at pretending to operate an imaginary machine with an imaginary zando.

“I’m assuming in my mind that Trump wins, because I can’t deal with being let down like that again,”

“Secretly, in a little corner in the back of my mind, I’m wishing and hoping that Biden wins. But most of my brain is saying, ‘OK, Trump wins and New York is not getting a fiscal bailout and we’re going to lose more ground on the environment, we’re going to lose on Roe v. Wade, we’re going to lose on health care.’”

It’s hard to overstate the degree of anxiety in America right now, as the country confronts a Hydra of troubles: the pandemic, the economy, the fires, the protests, the violent plots against public officials, the assault on voting rights, the state-sponsored disinformation, the sense that democracy itself is on the ballot.

US adults are three times as likely to have a “very favorable” view of small businesses as they are of large enterprises (59% v 17%), according to a 2018 survey from the Public Affairs Council.

The nostalgia for small-town life and “mom and pop” stores stands in stark contrast not only to an urbanized population but the power of large companies.

From the moment we wake up to eat our cereal and brush our teeth, our consumer choices are dominated by a handful of large companies.

In Europe, recent figures indicate that games are played by more than two thirds of children and adolescents, and a substantial number of adults now play games

30 academics wrote a paper in which they opposed the gaming disorder classification, arguing there was a lack of consensus among researchers who study games and that the quality of the evidence base was low.

gaming disorder in the WHO draft are very similar to those used to define gambling disorder. It’s an interesting approach, but it risks pathologising behaviours that are normal for hundreds of millions of regular gamers.

The new product line contains a variety of what Play-Doh calls “Grown Up Scents,” including “Overpriced Latte,” “Mom Jeans,” “Dad Sneakers,” “Spa Day,” “Lord of the Lawn,” and “Grill King.”

The new product line contains a variety of what Play-Doh calls “Grown Up Scents,” including “Overpriced Latte,” “Mom Jeans,” “Dad Sneakers,” “Spa Day,” “Lord of the Lawn,” and “Grill King.”

They’re also aimed at “anyone who loves a good laugh,” Vadaketh said.

The human brain is more complex than any other known structure in the universe.

Weighing in at three pounds, on average, this spongy mass of fat and protein is made up of two overarching types of cells—called glia and neurons—and it contains many billions of each.

The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, accounting for 85 percent of the organ's weight. The distinctive, deeply wrinkled outer surface is the cerebral cortex. It's the cerebrum that makes the human brain—and therefore humans—so formidable. Animals such as elephants, dolphins, and whales actually have larger brains, but humans have the most developed cerebrum. It's packed to capacity inside our skulls, with deep folds that cleverly maximize the total surface area of the cortex.

It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit

And that nightly dinner doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal that took three hours to cook, nor does it need to be made with organic arugula and heirloom parsnips.

For starters, researchers found that for young children, dinnertime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than being read aloud t

In 2020, the top three educational systems in the world were Finland, Denmark, and South Korea

This is based on developmental levels including early childhood enrollment, test scores in math, reading, and science in primary and secondary levels, completion rates, high school and college graduation, and adult literacy rates.

Finland's education system is a dream: early education is designed around learning through play, school meals are free, and universities are tuition-free for students coming from EU, European Economic Area (EEA) countries, and Switzerland. A majority of teachers also have a master's degree; in fact, basic education teachers are required to have them.

not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.

1. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day – not your fears or impulses.

"What is the meaning of life?" It's one of those enormous questions that's so important -- both philosophically and practically, in terms of how we live our lives -- and yet we rarely, if ever, stop to really think about the answer.

After studying 1,300 subjects from ages 21 to more than 100, the authors found that older people were more likely to have found their life's purpose, while younger people were more likely still searching. That's logical, given that wisdom is often born from experience. According to research by Stanford education professor William Damon, the author of "The Path to Purpose," only 20% of young adults have a fully realized sense of their life's meaning.And according to the new study, the presence of meaning in one's life showed a positive correlation to one's health, including improved cognitive function, while searching for it may have a slight negative effect. Mental and physical well-being was self-reported, and having a sense of purpose tended to peak around age 60, the study found.

According to two other studies published in 2014 -- one among 9,000 participants over age 65 and another among 6,000 people between 20 and 75 -- those who could articulate the meaning and purpose of their lives lived longer than those who saw their lives as aimless. It didn't seem to matter what meaning participants ascribed to their life, whether it was personal (like happiness), creative (like making art) or altruistic (like making the world a better place). It was having an answer to the question that mattered.

According to mounting evidence, it's impossible to recall images with near perfect accuracy.

But people with Herculean memories tend to be adept at one specific task—i.e., a person who memorizes cards may be inept at recognizing faces.

Alan Searleman, a professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in New York, says eidetic imagery comes closest to being photographic.

In a study published in the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology, researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey screened the mobile phones of 200 health care workers in hospitals for germs that are known to be dangerous to human health.

The solution to this problem may be decidedly low tech -- disinfectant spray and a paper towel.

Specifically, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones -- and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent

Deciphering how the brain processes sight and hearing could have implications for how we understand and treat conditions such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia.

schizophrenia

Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.By doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe.

A groundbreaking brain-scanning technique has uncovered evidence that suggests schizophrenia is linked to a loss of connections between brain cells.

They used a tracer that binds to the protein and which emits a signal that can be picked up by a PET brain scan, which provided an indirect measure of the density of connections. The team scanned 18 adults with schizophrenia and compared them with 18 people without the condition. They found that levels of SV2A were significantly lower in the front of the brain – the region involved in planning – in people with schizophrenia.

Although the precise role of neurogenesis in memory is still controversial, more than a decade of research has demonstrated that boosting neurogenesis with exercise and antidepressants such as Prozac can increase rodents' ability to learn new information about places and events. A few years ago, however, neuroscientist Paul Frankland of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, noticed that some of the animals in his experiment actually did worse on certain memory tasks when their neuron birth rates had been ramped up. In particular, they performed poorly on tests that required them to retain details about past events.

It is difficult to completely eliminate the birth of new neurons in infant mice, but by genetically engineering dividing neural stem cells to self-destruct the team was able to achieve about a 50% reduction of neurogenesis in the animals, Frankland says. With less neurogenesis, the young rodents acted more like adult mice in the experiment. They froze when first placed in the box for roughly a week, rather than just 1 day, after receiving the foot shocks.

"Well it was a false report. I was down during the day and I was there for a tiny, little short period of time. And it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day."

"I've gone down two or three times, all for inspection. And, you go there, some day you may need it. I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day, and it was not a problem. And I read about it, in like, a big thing. There was never a problem ... nobody ever came close to giving us a problem."

This re-framing of history is remarkable solely for the gall it takes to attempt it. After all, every single major media organization reported over the weekend -- with NO pushback from the White House -- that Trump had been taken into the bunker for his own protection, not to, uh, "inspect" it.