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“Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations With Physical Pain” ” … They memorize numbers much the same way. Cooke converts every two-digit number from 00 to 99 into a familiar object or person, so that every six digits form a sentence. When he sees 342102, Cooke imagines Frank Sinatra crooning the Britney Spears’ song ” … Baby One More Time” to an obelisk. When he’s doing well, this translation is happening instantaneously. At his best, he can store about 300 digits, or 50 sentences, in his head in five minutes. To keep all this information in order, memorizers have to link their images together in a chain. Some, like Cooke and Amsuess, use what’s called the “journey method.” They place their images at predetermined points along a route that they know well. Cooke’s route begins at his favorite Oxford pub and ends at a nearby hotel. When it comes time to recall, he simply takes a mental stroll through his old college town and is able see each of the images in the place where he put it.” “… Michael Gazzinga and Roger Sperry of Caltech were the first to do split brain experiments and Sperry was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize. One experiment they engaged in involved lateralizing a stimulus to the right hemisphere showing a command to the left eye exclusively. Amazingly, when the right hemisphere received a command like “laugh,” the patient would chortle, but when asked why, the confused left hemisphere would confabulate an answer, such as “you guys are just too much.” The same was true for visual images. When images were shown to the right brain and the left brain was given conflicting information, the left brain would provide a rationalization for its conflicting information. The responses were so strong and profound that the experimenters wondered whether this sort of thing was happening all of the time. Since then, neuroscientists have done a great deal of work on memory and learning. We now know that the brain routinely fills in information gaps with, well, whatever you’re already predisposed to think. People really do see what they expect to see. Much like a person attempting to wake from a dream, a person wishing to find inspiration in the world needs not only to keep their eyes open, but also to make sure that they constantly suppress the brain chatter that ever seeks to fill the unexpected with the banal.” 
“Carl Schoonover, 27, who is midway through a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Columbia, decided to draw the general reader into his subject with the sheer beauty of its images in “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century,” newly published by Abrams.” (via Colorful Images to Help Illuminate the Brain) “Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don’t always know what others are really feeling. Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain. Fake smiles can be performed at will, because the brain signals that create them come from the conscious part of the brain and prompt the zygomaticus major muscles in the cheeks to contract. These are the muscles that pull the corners of the mouth outwards. Genuine smiles, on the other hand, are generated by the unconscious brain, so are automatic. When people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion. As well as making the mouth muscles move, the muscles that raise the cheeks – the orbicularis oculi and the pars orbitalis – also contract, making the eyes crease up, and the eyebrows dip slightly. Lines around the eyes do sometimes appear in intense fake smiles, and the cheeks may bunch up, making it look as if the eyes are contracting and the smile is genuine. But there are a few key signs that distinguish these smiles from real ones. For example, when a smile is genuine, the eye cover fold - the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid - moves downwards and the end of the eyebrows dip slightly.” “… One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read. Continue reading the main story The alien test An extract from the Princeton University test The text at the top is in Arial; the bottom is in Comic Sans MS Volunteers were able to remember more when the information was written in the bottom font, or in the Bodoni MT font Source: Princeton University The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale. The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember. Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more. They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.”
"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. The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding."
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