Tag: humans
-
Touching.
Every year, museums bear the cost of repairing the damage caused to their artworks by visitors touching them. Why would people want to touch objects they can clearly see? What is it that touch provides that vision does not? Philosophers, starting with René Descartes, all noted that touch provided ‘a sense of reality’, and made…
-
Earth’s core. Human souls.
A new study could help us understand how our planet was formed. Scientists report that their research shows that Earth’s inner core is solid – a finding made possible by a new method for detecting shear waves, or ‘J waves’ in the inner core. (1) We believe that pressure creates solids. That diamonds are the…
-
Trained to be altruistic?
The decisions of individuals such as their willingness to cooperate and altruistic acts are just as important as international agreements or national regulations. This is what scientists call “prosocial behavior”. Psychologists from the University of Würzburg and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now published the results of…
-
Reading. Breathing.
Reading is something very complex. Moving from what letters look like to what they sound like is a complex multi-sensory task that requires cooperation among brain areas specialized for visual and auditory processing. Researchers call this collection of specialized brain regions that map letters to sounds (or phonemes) the reading network. The extent to which…
-
Did you learn anything? Listen to the abyss.
Jason Chan makes a point to periodically interrupt his lecture and ask students a question about the material they’ve covered. The associate professor of psychology at Iowa State University does this to regain students’ attention, but more importantly, to enhance their ability to learn new information. Researchers know the retrieval process is beneficial for new…
You must be logged in to post a comment.