Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

‘The Internet Made Me Do It’: Stop Blaming Social Media for Our Behavioral Problems

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The Internet is destroying our national parks. That’s according to Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree National Park in California, anyway. Lange spoke to New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer, who wrote a depressing story about the recent uptick in graffiti on public lands. According to Lange, park personnel are blaming social media for the rise in vandalism. “In the old days, people would paint something on a rock—it wouldn’t be till someone else came along that someone would report it and anybody would know about it.” Lange told the Times, “with social media ... Read More

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Could Family Longevity Protect Against Dementia?

May 31, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The sons and daughters of people who live very long lives tend to get the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease later than others, but they're not immune from the memory-robbing disease, according to a new study. Based on comparisons of people in their 90s, their spouses, siblings, children, and their children's spouses, researchers found that the offspring of people with exceptional longevity were about 40 percent less likely than peers to be cognitively impaired between ages 65 and 79. "It's not necessarily that these individuals never become cognitively impaired, but what it seems like is ... Read More

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Why Chess Should Be Required in U.S. Schools

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Rook to B8. Checkmate. There's nothing quite like the feeling of defeating a worthy opponent in a game of chess: the ultimate battle of the wits. Of course, it's not a feeling I have very often, since I'm not very good at chess. On the other hand, my father is officially an "expert" and my friend is a "master." In other words, they are both very, very good. To give an idea of how good, if I was to play 100 games with each of them, I would win precisely zero. Worldwide, chess is still a popular game, but it is treated with particular seriousness in Eastern Europe. For instance, the ... Read More

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Mindfulness Training Boosts Test Scores

March 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO COLLAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Studies reporting the benefits of mindfulness training keep rolling in—not quite with the regularity of those distracting thoughts that keep popping up in your head, but at a good clip nonetheless. The latest, from a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports even a short, two-week course in focusing the mind can lead to immediate, tangible results: higher scores on tests measuring reasoning and comprehension. “Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching ... Read More

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Music of Vivaldi Boosts Mental Vitality

March 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The Mozart Effect—the notion that listening to certain pieces of classical music can boost one’s brainpower—was initially embraced, widely popularized, and then largely debunked. But like an operatic character who keeps singing robustly on her deathbed, it refuses to go quietly. Now, new research from the U.K. has found cognitive benefits from listening to one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. In an experiment, the work’s evocative Spring section, “particularly the well-recognized, vibrant, emotive and uplifting first movement, had the ... Read More

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Thinking vs. Knowing: When Facts Get in the Way

March 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Thinking is not easy. It requires effort. Whenever possible, all of us seek to avoid it by replacing it with knowledge. Once we know something — 2+2=4, the trash is collected on Tuesdays, or it takes two hours to drive to Chicago when there is no traffic — we don’t have to think about it again. Paradoxically, one of the fruits of thinking is that it leads to the acquisition of knowledge that replaces the need to think, such as thinking in order to answer the question, “When is the trash collected?” leads to knowing always on Tuesday. Even great thinkers clear their mental decks in ... Read More

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The Brain-Focusing Power of the Lab Coat

February 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Schoolchildren grappling with a tough assignment are encouraged to “put your thinking cap on.” But parents and teachers offering this advice may be focusing on the wrong garment. Perhaps students should instead slip into their thinking jackets. That’s the implication of a newly published study, which found wearing a white lab coat — a piece of clothing associated with care and attentiveness — improved performance on tests requiring close and sustained attention. Importantly, the effect was not found when the garment in question was identified as a visual artist’s ... Read More

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Thinking Creatively: Just Add Milk

February 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Want to boost your creativity? Tomorrow morning, pour some milk into an empty bowl, and then add the cereal. That may sound, well, flaky. But according to a newly published study, preparing a common meal in reverse order may stimulate innovative thinking. Avoiding conventional behavior at the breakfast table “can help people break their cognitive patterns, and thus lead them to think more flexibly and creatively,” according to a research team led by psychologist Simone Ritter of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She and her colleagues, including Rodica Ioana Damian ... Read More

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Sex on the Brain Proves Costly for Men

January 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Ladies: Do you have any idea how much power you have over us men? To quote the classic song, it seems the very thought of you is enough to dull our brains. That’s the conclusion of a research team from the Netherlands, which reports the mere anticipation of interacting with a woman can temporarily impede men’s mental abilities. In one experiment, “Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men’s cognitive performance,” the team from the Radboud University Nijmegen Behavioral Sciences Institute writes in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. In ... Read More

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Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes

December 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Can you mentally rotate a three-dimensional object, getting a clear sense of how it looks it from a variety of angles? It’s a specific cognitive skill that has been the subject of much study in recent years, since it’s a key component of processing spatial information. Professionals ranging from auto mechanics to brain surgeons rely on this ability. A newly published study suggests there may be a way to enhance this important skill, and it does not involve spending hours in front of a computer screen. Rather, it suggests students might want to put down their laptops and pick up a ... Read More

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