Here's a short and interesting introduction to the topic of laughter by UCL professor Sophie Scott. It's interesting that laughter seems to have an evolutionary heritage that goes way way back, since other animals appear to do it too, but more interesting to me is what goes on in the ...
Continue
Jay Uhdinger of the appropriately named jayuhdinger.com has put together a free course on meditation and CBT. The course is called Success != Happiness and covers techniques to help you gain greater control over your emotions and ultimately more happiness. Everything in Jay's course is fully supported by research. CBT ...
Continue
One huge frustration I have with learning Spanish -- and I understand I'm not alone on this -- is missing loads of what's being said while translating one particular word. While listening to a dialogue, my attention latches on to words I recognise and I try to retrieve the English translation. ...
Continue
Just to expand on the previous post about the effect of action video games on attention, here's a little more detail about the experiment in the paper. In this test, a group of participants, all with little or no video game playing experience, were randomly assigned to two groups. The first group ...
Continue
It's often said that the youth of our society wastes their time playing video games; ostensibly a purely diversionary activity with no inherent merit. However, as someone with a youth misspent in this way, I have to disagree. There are many ways I feel video game-playing may serve me well ...
Continue
I've been digging into research papers again, looking for ways to enhance second language acquisition. After working through a few papers and an introductory text book, I was left thinking "When are they going to get to the part about how to learn languages better?" Most of the research seems ...
Continue
Anything you do for an extended period of time has neurological and cognitive effects. Speaking another language is one thing that seems to have a wide range of effects, one of which being performance in tasks involving reasoning about other people's beliefs, such as the false belief task. The False Belief ...
Continue
I saw a TED talk that made me think about resilience, and how it's such a broad and useful concept to have in your mental repertoire. You can apply it to anything and it will give you useful, practical ideas. This example is access to food, but I think the ...
Continue
Piracetam is a nootropic – a compound used to improve mental performance in some way. They're often called (and sold as) “smart drugs.” The name derives from the Greek words nous and trepein, meaning “mind” and “to turn” respectively. Or so Wikipedia says at least. You may be familiar with ...
Continue
Biofeedback is a process where biological or neurological (in which case it would be neurofeedback) systems are monitored by a device, and information is fed back from the device to the individual (or a doctor stood next to said individual). This allows us to monitor, regulate, investigate and learn ...
Continue
