Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

Identity in question: 1.1 What is identity? - OpenLearn - Open University - DD100_2 This unit is about questions of identity. Identity itself seems to be about a question, ‘who am I?’ We are going to focus on three key questions in this section: How are identities formed?How much control do we have in shaping our own identities? First, we need to think a bit more about what we mean by identity. If identity provides us with the means of answering the question ‘who am I?’ This example also illustrates the importance of marking oneself as having the same identity as one group of people and a different one from others. How do we know which people are the same as us? In this sense, although as individuals we have to take up identities actively, those identities are necessarily the product of the society in which we live and our relationship with others. However, how I see myself and how others see me do not always fit. The subject, ‘I’ or ‘we’ in the identity equation, involves some element of choice, however limited.

Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins | Literally Psyched A stylized apple with a bite taken out of its right side: chances are, even if you don’t own a single Apple product, you would still recognize the ubiquitous logo. But have you ever paused to consider the symbol’s origin? The logo's rainbow represents color bars on a screen. Image credit: Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons. Perhaps it’s Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge, the apple a symbol of new discovery, with subtle undertones of lust for ever-growing innovation. Or maybe, Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree when the apocryphal falling fruit prompted his theory of gravity. Two years after Turing was tried for indecency for a romantic liaison with a 19-year-old male—the exact same charge, incidentally, that was levied against his compatriot Oscar Wilde in 1895, over half a century earlier—and then forced to undergo hormonal therapy to temper his “indecent urges” (the effective equivalent of male castration), he committed suicide—by biting a cyanide-laced apple. How boring.

The Benefits of Daydreaming A new study suggests that a daydreaming is an indicator of a well-equipped brain Does your mind wander? During a class or meeting, do you find yourself staring out the window and thinking about what you’ll do tomorrow or next week? As a child, were you constantly reminded by teachers to stop daydreaming? Well, psychological research is beginning to reveal that daydreaming is a strong indicator of an active and well-equipped brain. A new study, published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. For example, imagine that, when leaving a friend ‘s house, you promise to call when you get home safely. In the study, the researchers sought to examine the relationship between people’s working memory capacity and their tendency to daydream. Why might this be the case?

Language and Emotion – Insights from Psychological Science - Association for Psychological Science News We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being. Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias. In an exposure therapy study, participants were split into different experimental groups and they were instructed to approach a spider over several consecutive days. Published online August 16, 2012 in Psychological Science Lead author: Katharina Kircanski — katharina.kircanski@gmail.com Unlocking Past Emotion: The Verbs We Use Can Affect Mood and Happiness

Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances. In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear. Our senses must also regularly meet and greet in the brain to provide accurate impressions of the world. Seeing What You Hear We can usually differentiate the sights we see and the sounds we hear. Beep Baseball Blind baseball seems almost an oxymoron. Calling What You See Bats and whales, among other animals, emit sounds into their surroundings—not to communicate with other bats and whales—but to “see” what is around them. Do You Have Synesthesia?

Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding oceans away. During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services. It was a grim attempt. With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. The Knowledge GapThere can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. Of course, it’s not just sexers and spotters and amnesiacs who enjoy unconscious learning. Flexible IntelligenceOne of the most impressive features of brains—and especially human brains—is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes their way.

Unlocking past emotion: verb use affects mood and happiness. Emotion Selectively Distorts Our Recollections On September 11, 2001, Elizabeth A. Phelps stepped outside her apartment in lower Manhattan and noticed a man staring toward the World Trade Center, about two miles away. Looking up, “I just saw this big, burning hole,” Phelps recalls. The man told her that he had just seen a large airplane crash into one of the skyscrapers. Thinking it was a horrible accident, Phelps started walking to work, a few blocks away, for a 9 A.M. telephone meeting. Like Phelps, many Americans have searing memories of that day. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content

Exceptional Memory Explained: How Some People Remember What They Had for Lunch 20 Years Ago Researchers from the University of California, Irvine reported in 2006 on a woman named Jill Price who could remember in great detail what she did on a particular day decades earlier. James McGaugh, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker put the woman through a battery of tests and ascertained that she was not using any of the memory tricks that have been known to mnemonists for millennia. Word got out, the media descended and the lab now receives calls every day from people who say they have the same ability as Price. Of the hundreds of people interviewed, 22 appear to exhibit what the researchers call highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), the detailed recollection of events that occurred in the distant past. A question that has persisted about this line of research is whether the brains of these people are distinct from the organs of others who can’t remember yesterday’s lunch, let alone trivial events from 20 years back. Source: University of California, Irvine

S0960-9822(09)01824-7?_returnURL= Figure 1 Box-Plot Diagram of the Values tnorm(F0max) and tnorm(Imax) Distribution of all observed melody and intensity contours in German and French newborns' crying, displayed as box plots of the 25th to 75th percentile, with the solid vertical line inside each box representing the median and the bars outside each box representing the minimum and maximum values. The dashed vertical line represents a symmetric melody arc. The data indicate a preference for either rising (French group) or falling (German group) melodies. Figure 2 Time Waveform and Narrow-Band Spectrograms of a Typical French Cry and a Typical German Cry Figure 3 Diagrammed Cry Melody as Time Function of Fundamental Frequency F0 with Time-Normalized Duration Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language [1–3] .