kismetism

How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? →

Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.

Turning Words Into Touchdowns →

While that’s a crude presentation of the work, you get the idea: Subtle, almost undetectable patterns can be analyzed to determine how likely a political figure is to engage in terrorist activity. Roger Hall, a consulting psychologist for SSA and CEO of Achievement Metrics, claims, “If you give us unidentified speech text, we can distinguish terrorists with 90 percent accuracy.” Now you understand why they don’t talk publicly about their work. Is the leader of that new group in Afghanistan blowing hot air or is he trouble? That’s the kind of question the intelligence community is interested in.

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits →

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

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But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

Results from my taking these two tests from this article: YOUR BRAIN ON COMPUTERS: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. The article is about multitasking and human brains… nothing we probably haven’t already heard before.

But they included two “Tests” that you can take… one to test your focus and ability to filter out distractions, the other to test how quickly you can switch tasks.

Thought these were both great fun, and I was surprised/gratified by how well I appeared to do. XD Maybe I get to claim the technology is not having an adverse effect on me in these ways at least. ;x

On the focus test… it’s annoying, but I only got one wrong because the first slide flashed by so fast that I don’t think I even saw it at all. I sat on the second screen for a while before I realized that it WAS the second screen, so I just had to guess randomly. qq.

Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes from →

Consciousness is one of neuroscience’s long-standing mysteries. At its most basic, it is the simple question of why we become aware of some thoughts or feelings, while others lurk unnoticed below conscious perception. Is there a single module in the brain, a “seat of consciousness” if you like, that is responsible for awareness? Or is it a result of more complicated activity across a number of brain regions? Solve this, and we may be a little closer to explaining the more esoteric aspects of our complex internal experience.

Invisibility cloaks closer to living up to their name →

Wish they had pictures…