Cognitive gadgets Bookshops are wonderful places – and not all the good stuff is in books. A few months ago, I spotted a man standing in the philosophy section of a local bookshop with his daughter, aged three or four. … Continue reading Thinking devices
This physicist is trying to make sense of the brain’s tangled networks At age 16, Danielle Bassett spent most of her day at the piano, trying to train her fingers and ignoring a throbbing pain in her forearms. She hoped … Continue reading Thinking in graphs
Being Prompted To Think About Coffee Elevates Your Physiological Arousal And Focuses Your Mind, No Ingestion Required So entrenched is the association in our culture between coffee and ideas of arousal, ambition and focus that merely thinking about, or being … Continue reading Mere exposure matters
Are You Hitting Your Limit, or Getting Stronger? The Power of Reinterpreting Mental Effort Listen to your elders, they say. Well, I wasn’t sure what to think when as a seven-year-old I sat in the kitchen and listened to my … Continue reading Mental gym
Immediately Re-Watching Lecture Videos Doesn’t Benefit Learning Given a passage of text to study, many students repeatedly re-read it in the hope the information will eventually stick. Psychology research has shown the futility of this approach. Re-reading is a poor … Continue reading Distributed practice
Folie à deux and Homicide for the Holidays Nothing says home for the holidays like a series of murders committed by family members with a shared delusion. So sit back, sip your hot apple cider or spiked egg nog, and … Continue reading Is insanity contagious?
Where is the boundary between your phone and your mind? Many of the boundary lines in our lives are highly literal, and, for the most part, this is how we’ve been trained to think of boundaries: as demarcations shored up … Continue reading Borders
