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How to Take Good Notes: Go Low-Tech
More and more students are opting to take notes on laptops to save trees and – they assume – take better notes. But is this assumption correct? According to the findings UCLA’s Dr. Danny Oppenheimer recently published in Psychological Science , these students are wrong: in a study of note-taking comparing handwritten to typed notes, Meuller…
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How do we see so many colors on a digital screen?
How can we possibly perceive a world of colors from just red, green, and blue, the colors of lights in TV, computer, and phone screens? The answer has to do with the way our visual system is set up: We have three different kinds of cones in the retina which respond most to what we…
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The Top 5 Differences Between Undergraduate and Graduate School
When deciding whether or not to attend graduate school, a lot of prospective students ask how it is different that undergrad. Is it more difficult? Less fun? Stressful? Whether you are thinking of applying to grad school, have a friend/sibling/daughter/son/niece/nephew/etc. in grad school and still don’t quite understand what it means, or are a graduate…
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Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: The Psychology of Survivor
Watching Survivor also offers opportunities for social comparison and reflection, especially when it comes to morals and ethics.
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Surrendering to Creativity: The Psychology of Remembering to Breathe (Part 3 of 3)
Up until graduate school, I often indulged the myth that good writing was a sacred thing to be done under the most precise conditions. Akin to knowing without a timer when the soufflee has finished (sorry, I have holidays sweets on the mind), the creativity dedicated to a well-written piece had to be carefully cultured…
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A Meditation On Meditation: Behavioral Flexibility and Success
As an undergraduate I worked for a man who was, if nothing else, compelling. Tall and trim, with a bushy handlebar mustache, slicked back hair, and a propensity for pulling out and smoking an e-cigarette in the middle of lab meetings, my adviser could often be heard shouting expletives at his computer from down the…
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Serial: the Case of Memory
Serial has quickly become an international obsession. From the master storytellers of This American Life, the focal story of the inaugural season is about details surrounding the 1999 conviction of then high-school student Adnan Syed for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. A new episode is released every Thursday (this week will be the…
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I’ll take one Lassie, no wait…make that an Air Bud
A study published in PLOS ONE looked at 100 films that featured a dog as a main character from 1939 to 2003 along with the number of registrations with the American Kennel Club by breed in the 10 years before and after each film
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Hook, Line, and Thinker
“What is the grandmother statement?” My undergraduate thesis advisor used to ask this a lot during lab meetings. He emphasized that psychological research should be presented in a way such that anyone could effectively understand your research goals and findings without a great deal of scientific knowledge (i.e. the nonacademic community). I bring this up…
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New research: From Screen to Green: What happens to kids social skills when they go cold turkey on all media?
The fact is we all stare at screens more than we would like and many of us rely on these tools to communicate with others, even during times when we should be spending quality time with our families and friends. So does all this time staring at screens, which may take time away from looking…