S4 Ep20: Why Everybody Should Read Harry Potter
The real magic of Harry Potter is that it can reduce prejudice and boost empathy. This week we break down the psychological benefits of literature
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There Is An Upside To Awkwardness After All
We can all be pretty awkward. Right? Here we cover the psychology of awkwardness. But it's not all bad news. It’s a good thing that we’re aware of ourselves and care about how others perceive us. Feeling awkward can push us to sharpen our social skills.
Being in an <a href="https://rumble.com/v3ry4x-well-this-is-awkward.html" target="_blank">awkward</a> situation is nothing new to each and every individual living on this planet. The pressure of always remaining in the good graces of the crowd weighs down on our shoulders and makes our anxiety levels sky-rocket fairly regularly. But science thinks that not everything is black and white and that somewhere in that gray area this uncomfortableness we’re feeling makes us grow our people skills. Crazy, right?
Apparently, it’s not that crazy. Scientists have this theory that we have two perceptions of ourselves, the first one represents our introspective view and how we see ourselves, while the second one represents how we think the other people see us on the outside. To us, this second one is extremely important because it may affect our social status and interaction. Granted, we may never be too satisfied of ourselves, but we like to play by the <a href="https://rumble.com/v4spcr-introvert-at-puppy-playtime.html" target="_blank">unwritten standards of society</a>.
So how do we go about dealing with those mild anxiety attacks we experience each time we misinterpret a greeting? Make sure you check out the whole video to find out! Enjoy!
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S4 Ep13: Why people blame others | Field Guide to Bad Behavi
Humans are complicated: a tangled web of amazing biology and bad behaviours. This illustrated field guide will equip you with the necessary tools to navigate the lying, jealous and judgmental tendencies of your fellow humans. This week we explore blame-shifting
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S4 Ep11: The Power of Curiosity
All forms of curiosity, even silly hypotheticals, are important – they can lead to practical ideas as well. And two groups are great at it: kids and smart adults. But the average person forgets to be curious. Here we explore the power of curiosity, and in the words of Joe Hanson – Stay Curious! Don’t shy away from asking questions, however pointless they may seem.
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S4 Ep10: How Halfalogues Manipulate Your –
A halfalogue is that distracting half-of-a-conversation that you overhear. And you absolutely must know the other half. Because you're a curious human and your brain circuitry rewards you for finding out. Here's the lowdown.
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Remixes Hijack Our Brain By Using The Language Of Nostalgia
YouTube, as a platform for creative expression, has inspired a new form of modern creativity. In this video essay, there is an exploration into how the remix, a product of this participatory creativity, hijacks your brain. Why do we love watching things we've probably already seen be reproduced in new ways?
A guy from New Jersey, John Sedano, creates covers of various songs. This Japanese creator played the songs just using calculators because art is not such a straight line. This extra meaning and relevance was generated by the audience where disparate individuals interacted to create together. This video will look into creativity through the lens of the remix. All the remix songs have one thing in common - we all want to watch them. Why is so enjoyable to watch something already seen or heard by being reproduced in a new way? At the heart of the remix is the idea of participatory creativity and it is not a product of a single individual but of social systems, and what is being produced in this way is a novel variation of ideas already floating around in that system, and right now you are in one of these systems - on <a href="https://rumble.com/v328ee-10-weirdest-videos-on-youtube.html" target="_blank">YouTube</a>!
The easiest way to understand human creativity today is by studying the Internet which has given rise to this particular easy to digest format. YouTube has been called a remix culture and through this culture collective intelligence merge. So why remixes hijack our brains? Because repetition is the most convincing and compelling way to make a point and we crave repetitive, easy to digest pieces of media. We get an emotional boost from humor, nostalgia, and love finding evidence that confirm something we have long suspected or we already believe. Remixing is the language of the <a href="https://rumble.com/v34ck1-why-would-you-put-that-on-the-internet-114.html" target="_blank">Internet</a> and it’s a new way our voices can be heard.
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You Don't Have To Be Einstein To Spark Creative Thinking
It seems like some people have so many great ideas - like <a href="https://rumble.com/v31hih-did-einstein-know-the-truth-about-aliens.html" target="_blank">Albert Einstein</a>, who apart from changing everything we know about the whole of space and time, he also took a stab at fashion. Rest assured there are ways that the rest of us can be more creative, too. We explore some practical tips for boosting your creativity and generating ideas.
Why do some people have so many great ideas? And how can the rest of us be more creative? Creativity is the result of large brain networks that interact with each other to generate random thoughts, change them and merge them and this happens through three mental skills: bending, breaking and blending. Bending is when we imagine things in new ways, breaking is when we take an idea and break it into pieces and blending is when we mix few things together.
In 2017 study, researchers found those who score high on creativity tests have more connections between brain hemispheres and stronger communication between brain networks, and the people who come up with many original answers to a question possess a skill called divergent thinking.
Remember that you are not stuck with the brain you have, your brain networks are flexible and you can practice creativity. So read more, pay more attention, visit a <a href="https://rumble.com/v45fql-museum-of-selfies-to-open-january-2018-in-glendale.html" target="_blank">museum</a>, and travel to feed your imagination. Keep generating ideas and come back to the ground with fresh eyes and hopefully fresh ideas. Don’t forget to surround yourself with interesting people. We need humans and our society for creativity to flourish.
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S4 Ep6: The Neuroscience of Creativity
Creativity depends on the cooperation of two competing networks: one that generates spontaneous thoughts (the default mode network) and the executive control center of the brain that governs everything else. Our random, free-flowing thoughts that are worthy of further exploration pop into our consciousness when they're recruited by the executive control network.
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S4 Ep5: The Surprising Similarities Between Twister and Inte
Network Neuroscience offers a new way to look at our brains –where researchers organize our brain's connections as patterns and look at how those connections interact, change and stay the same when we perform different tasks. It turns out that the flexibility of those connections can indicate how quickly we can learn or multitask –and is a top predictor of intelligence.
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S4 Ep4: Artificial Intelligence Can Hallucinate, Too.
Can artificial intelligence tell the difference between labradoodles and fried chicken? ...probably. But they can also see things that... aren't there.
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The Capacity Of Intimate Relationships Predicts All Aspects Of Life
What's the key to happiness and life satisfaction? One study followed a group of people for more than seventy years to find out. Watch this video and find out what they discovered!
Can you think of one thing that could make you happy over the course of your life, which does not include tacos and Harry Potter. Think of something that could actually sustain your happiness for many years. You can say anything you like, but to measure it scientifically we would have to study your regular integrals for most of your life. Luckily, that study has already been done.
The Harvard Grant Study began in 1938 and it followed 268 male undergraduate students for more than seventy years. They planned to track them over their entire lives, so they can measure a lot of psychological and physiological traits like their personality, IQ, and the function of their major organs. Because it was so huge it had so many findings like your financial success is more dependent on the warmth of your relationship than intelligence. And cigarette smoking was the single greatest factor that contributed to the men’s deaths.
When George Vaillant, the lead researcher of this study for more than 30 years, was asked what was the single greatest finding from it, he said it was the capacity of the intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of the men’s lives, concluding that happiness is <a href="https://rumble.com/v46tyd-i-love-you-do-you-love-me.html" target="_blank">love</a>.
What these seventy years of research suggest is ‘love is all you need’, which is what The Beatles sang about, but it doesn’t necessarily mean having a long relationship or marriage with a partner. The study looked at the men’s relationship with their parents and how that affected them over the course of their lives. The men who had a <a href="https://rumble.com/v3ow89-5-relationship-myths-and-what-the-reality-looks-like.html" target="_blank">warmer relationship</a> with their mothers as a child earned an average of $87,000 a year more than those who had an uncaring mother. Those with an uncaring mother were more likely to develop dementia later in life.
The warmth of the men’s relationship with their fathers was correlated with enjoying vacations more and having a life satisfaction at age 75. These findings are super-interesting. Of course correlation doesn’t equal causation. Watch this video and share your comments on this topic below!
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This Test Show Us Whether We Have A Male Or A Female Brain
Can we actually test the difference between the male and female brain? We are often told that there is a difference between male and female. Despite the most obvious reason of body parts and physique, does your gender really define you in other ways too? Is there such a thing as a male brain which can solve mathematical problems faster or a female brain that can be fluent in more languages?
The fact of the matter is that it’s not that much about the gender, but rather about the size and form of the brain. Male brains are bigger in size due to men being bigger in size than women in real life but it also has a lot more holes inside while a female brain is smaller but it contains a lot more of the bundles of fiber that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
But when it comes to certain abilities, gender is not even remotely influencing the brain. In fact, the gender barrier is mainly imposed by society and isn’t real. <a href="https://rumble.com/v301zo-human-brains-arent-distinctly-male-or-female-study.html" target="_blank">Studies</a> have shown that both men and women perform equally as good on test when gender isn’t mentioned, compared to other groups which have been asked to state their gender. So don’t let <a href="https://rumble.com/v334vp-female-doctors-better-than-male-doctors.html" target="_blank">society’s norms</a> keep you from doing what you want to do and trying new things. It’s literally only in your head.
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This Is How Your Brain Grows
How is our brain put together? And where do these 'pieces' come from?
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The Psychology of Personal Space
How does perceived 'personal space' impact your daily life?
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Re-Engineering Sight
These cool glasses give new hope for visually impaired people to see again.
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Can Reading Boost Emotional Intelligence?
The act of reading actually has proven impacts on your intelligence.
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Check Out This Amazing Story About Telepathy And Mind Reading
Do you believe in mind reading? So far, science denies its existence. At the same time, we still hear stories about telepathic experiences. Telepathy, direct transference of thought from one person (sender or agent) to another (receiver or percipient) without using the usual sensory channels of communication, hence a form of extrasensory perception (ESP).
This is a great story that begins in California in the late 90’s where a group of scientist got a group of cats to watch a movie. The cats had electrodes attached to the visual area of their brains. The researchers saw how the cats experienced the outside world by hacking into and recording what their brain cells were communicating. With these bits of information, they rebuilt images from the movies- as seen by the cats. Understanding how our brains encode information and how we can crack the code- could make <a href="https://rumble.com/v3349f-6-people-with-real-superpowers-caught-on-camera.html" target="_blank">”superpowers”</a> like telepathy a reality. While it seems like science fiction, telepathy of mind reading has a scientific name- Brain to brain communication. Between the thoughts of us, humans (or cats) is a computer, a Brain-Computer Interface.
It’s clunky compared to the elegant telepathy of Jedi knights. So the final answer to our question? Unfortunately, telepathy doesn’t exist, but advances in technology are bringing it closer to reality. We still need a computer interface between our brains- not as cool as <a href="https://rumble.com/v42b6n-10-greatest-star-wars-fan-theories.html" target="_blank">Star Wars</a>. If you could wear technology and communicate with a thought rather than speech what would you say?
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Apparently There Is An Upside To Forgetting
It’s not often that we say this, but sometimes it seems that there are worse things to fear than death, and the act of forgetting sits somewhere on top of that list. Living your life with diminishing memories from day to day can feel worse than totally leaving this earth. Forgetfulness is a silent killer of spirit and it just gets worse with age, but where were we?
There appears to be a positive side to forgetting after all, but in order to understand it. We need to understand how memories are lost. So we know that our brain decides to store past experiences in the form of memories in our mind, but think of it as a <a href="https://rumble.com/v3emh2-tense-moments-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html" target="_blank">flash drive</a>. It can only store so much. After a while our brain decides that memory is running short and it’s time to do a bit of clean up. There are actually two theories that explain the way memories are selected for removal. One of them is the decay theory which suggests that the brain deletes, so to say, old memories to make room for new, ant the interference theory suggests that whenever we experience a thing that is of similar value with a past memory, the new one is stacked on top of the old one, erasing the old memory in the process.
In reality though, both of these theories are true. Our brain creates two proteins, Mushashi and Adducin, the first one breaking the bonds between synapses and stopping the flow of information between nerve cells and the latter repairing that bond. What this means is that we have a constant fight of these two in our brain and it is the sole reason some memories are lost in the process. The good side of forgetting comes with the fact that whenever we lose a memory, it leaves a lot open for a new one to be stored. So don’t fret too much and work hard on making <a href="https://rumble.com/v30j3x-memory-quiz-top-score.html" target="_blank">memories</a> that count!
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How To Trick Your Body Into Feeling You Had A Good Night's Sleep
If you were sleep deprived, could you just fake that you got more sleep the night before? Science has some interesting answers. Imagine you wake up thinking you had a wonderful night’s sleep, you feel fantastic and you are going to wake up immediately. However, no matter how much sleep you get there is always that niggling voice inside your head that you need more sleep and you are the thing about how tired you are. But, with simply thinking about how good sleep you had can improve your brain function.
In a recent study, researchers told participants that those who spent more than 25% of their time asleep in REM sleep have better cognitive functioning. Simply believing that you had a good night’s sleep, even if you didn’t, it improves performance. But can you really fake sleep? Not really. But if you could stop thinking and talking about how tired you are, and plan a nap you could improve your sleeping. Researchers say that an afternoon nap is an ideal remedy for fatigue from sleep loss. But, that’s kind of unrealistic for us who have jobs and are not as brazen as George Constanza. One solution is active rest or progressive muscle <a href="https://rumble.com/v4hhw1-uwm-class-teaches-students-the-art-of-relaxation.html" target="_blank">relaxation</a>. You focus on one muscle, make it tense and then release. This will really help.
While it’s really hard to tell what the quality of our sleep was actually like, you should snooze less and nap more. Or active rest. It’s almost <a href="https://rumble.com/v39z0j-power-napping-pug-snores-through-her-doggy-dreams.html" target="_blank">napping</a>. So it seems the key to fake sleeping is actually… Fake sleep.
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If You Feel Very Drowsy In The Morning, This Might Explain Why
Feel disoriented when you wake up? One in seven people suffers from this effect called 'Sleep Drunkenness'.
It is the same for everybody: you wake up to the annoying sound of your alarm clock, telling you it is another day for you to get out of your bed and go about your day, but instead you talk to the phone, thinking someone is calling you and then ‘hang up’ to go back to your sleep. It is called ‘severe sleep inertia’, a state when you wake up suddenly from your slumber and you feel groggy and disoriented, thinking how confusing life is.
According to research, one in seven people experience this phenomenon, with episodes typically lasting up to 15 minutes after you are so rudely woken up. During those episodes, it is quite normal to pour your morning cereal in the dishwasher.
When we <a href="https://rumble.com/v3qc5z-our-sleep-patterns-inherited-from-hunter-gatherers-says-study.html" target="_blank">sleep</a>, we cycle through three stages of light and deep sleep. The first and second stages are light, called non-REM 1 and non-REM 2 stages. During these stages, we can be woken up pretty easily. But when we hit non-REM 3, we enter deep sleep, followed by REM, which stands for Rapid Eye Movement. Yes, our eyes actually move back and forth and we are most likely to dream during this stage.
Sleep drunkenness occurs when we are woken up from this REM stage, while our brains still contain a chemical called adenosine. It is a neurotransmitter that travels between nerve cells, promoting sleep and suppresses arousal. When you have your <a href="https://rumble.com/v47itx-starbucks-menu-change-could-be-game-changer-to-morning-coffee-routine.html" target="_blank">morning cup of joe</a>, the caffeine fights the morning effects of adenosine and speeds up the rate our nerve cells communicate with each other. This is especially helpful if you reach for your hot, black beverage as soon as you wake up.
So, next time you find yourself talking to your alarm in the morning, remember - there could be a sleep drunkenness anonymous group somewhere if we weren’t all so far apart.
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DIY Brain Enhancement or Frankenstein?
Would you experiment with your brain? Perhaps there's a Dr. Frankenstein in us all.
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