Neuropsych

New research shows how studying music helps the brain create new connections.

The happiest moments of our lives are when we lose ourselves – in art, in exercise, in love. According to Harvard’s Diane Paulus, being able to ‘play’ and engage in something outside of ourselves is a valuable respite from our egos.

A new study suggests the brain gets more desensitized to lying with each lie you tell.

Romantic advice from some of humanity’s biggest thinkers. 

Want to improve your mood? This study recommends you get walking, even for a short time, and even if your surroundings aren’t picturesque. 

Just imagining movement fires the same neurons as if we were actually moving. A new study shows we can wake our sleeping mind to practice motor skills in our dreams.  

Standardized testing is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. It’s not totally useless, but it does misunderstand the situation. The Imagination Institute’s Scott Barry Kaufman suggests a more three-dimensional search for intelligence.

Psychologists suggests tactics for confronting offensive speech.

Turns out no one is immune to being prejudiced. New research suggests that people of higher and lower cognitive ability are equally inclined, but direct their prejudice towards different social groups.  

Your ring-to-index finger ratio can tell a lot about what you’re good at and even what mental disorders you are prone to.   

What is masculinity? Should gentlemen watch pornography? How do we raise sons to be better than their fathers? What’s for dinner? Comedian Jim Gaffigan mulls over these big questions and more.

Narcissists aren’t born – they’re made, says development psychologist Alison Gopnik. She takes issue with the popular notion that children need to unlearn brashness and learn civility, when neuroscience shows that it tends to work in the reverse.

Robin Williams was trapped inside his own rapidly-deteriorating brain, which was being overtaken by what his wife refers to as a “terrorist” — Lewy Body Disease.

The IQ test is the most widely known measure of intelligence, but are the ‘twice exceptional’ and other gifted members of society slipping between the cracks?

A recent study from Yale University find that dogs are better at resisting peer-pressure and filtering useless information than human beings – but there’s value in that human flaw.

Forget multi-vitamins, pick up a happy spouse instead. This study suggests the enormous upward effect of having a partner who has a happy nature.

Is introversion sometimes invoked unwittingly to mask outright rude behavior? The answer is: it’s complicated. Here’s what introverts and non-introverts can do to navigate the complexity.

Does smiling make you happier? These and many other popular claims in psychology are not standing up to scrutiny. Here’s what that means for science.

A new study shows that addressing the ADHD epidemic may require a dose of physical activity, so kids can refocus and learn effectively in a classroom.

Eureka!

Surprisingly, this study was not funded by HBO, Netflix, Hulu or the Illuminati. 

A new study reveals that people naturally fall into 4 different personality types while making decisions: Optimist, Pessimist, Trusting, or Envious. 

Nikola Tesla, Franz Kafka, and Winston Churchill all practiced polyphasic sleep.   

Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has done more than just ‘think of the children’, she wrote a book – and it rules favorably for free play and the end of scholastic parenting.

Is the animal kingdom oblivious to our jokes or just a really tough crowd? Bill Nye explores the link between intelligence and humor.

Mindfulness mediation has many benefits, but to focus on the benefits is to miss the point of mindfulness. 

Genius kids are caught in the Goldilocks oatmeal paradox – if there’s too much heat on extracting their ability they suffer, but keep too cool a distance and they’ll be wasted.

Want five or six extra days every year? Easy – choose streaming over network TV. Adults are sacrificing 130 hours, and kids 150 hours, to ads annually when they watch commercial programming. 

Think happy, be happy? Maybe not. Harvard psychologist Susan David examines the backlash effect of forced positivity in our lives.

The word parenting, as a verb, has only been around since 1958. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik examines when caregiving became the art of hovering, and the pitfalls and anxiety of trying to shape children instead of raise them.