Category: Mind Space

Never too Old to Learn

If you thought that just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Apparently some people have the idea that age limits learning ability. New research has started to counter that myth, here’s a study that shows that people in their early 30s tend to have optimal facial recognition skills.

That conclusion is dramatically different from what researchers previously thought – that this ability peaked in adolescence, said Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who specializes in this disorder.

In a study published in the online version of Cognition, Germine, Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard, and Bradley Duchaine, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, detailed their results from a series of online experiments with about 60,000 participants.

They asked participants to take a series of tests involving face recognition of six young men. In another series of tests, they were also asked to learn and then recognize a series of women’s and children’s faces.

“People in their early 30s are best at this task,” said Germine in a phone interview with the Star. “Someone at age 16 and age 65 do about the same. Their face-recognition abilities are similar.”

Read more.

Fun things are good things!

Things are better when they’re fun! The Fun Theory (thefuntheory.com) has been busy promoting good things by making them more fun.

[Thefuntheory.com] is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

They’ve posted a bunch of youtube videos of everything from the aforementioned taking the stairs and putting garbage in proper bins, to obeying the speed limit.

Further proof that good things = fun things!

Why Poorer People Are Kind to One Another

For some reason there are stereotypes out there that imply that if you’re not part of the middle class then you are a jerk. Well, it looks like that maybe half true. New research has come out that started with the question why statistically do poorer people give a higher portion of their income to charity compared to the rich has now concluded with the idea that rich people are not as empathetic as the poor.

It would be nice if people who were better off gave more of their income to charities and to other worthy causes. I hope this inspires all of you to give.

Michael W Kraus, of the University of California, San Francisco, is one of a number of social psychologists who have recently been busy demonstrating that lower socioeconomic status (SES) is intricately linked to all sorts of prosocial behaviours. Everything else equal, the less wealth, education and employment status we have, the more charitable, generous, trusting and helpful we appear to become. In interactions with strangers, poorer people are more likely to use polite, attentive, respectful gestures. Most recently, in a paper just published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, Kraus et al report that lower SES subjects show significantly greater empathy than their richer, better educated counterparts. He argues that this tendency to empathise may at least partly explain the other observations of prosocial behaviour.

Read the rest at the Guardian.

Remember People Not Things This Holiday

Many people who celebrate Christmas (or similar holidays of gift-giving) tend to focus on giving mass quantities or expensive gifts without regard. Man vs. Debt is a blog that focuses on getting rid of material things (and not getting new material goods) and they have a good post up on what you can do this Christmas to give something great to people and not committing acts of blind consumerism.

The plan on what to do is on you.

Courtney and I have decided to severely limit the gifts we buy this year. We won’t be buying for each other (instead we are making huge life changes – trust me – we are spending enough on those “gifts”).

We’ve bought a few small traditional “gifts” for younger family members, but decided that we would make small donations on behalf of any adults in our life. We’ll be browsing to attempt to find charities and non-profits that reflect the values of each family member and rather than buy them golf balls or a candle, we’ll make a small donation.

We are lucky that none of our family really cares about the “stuff”. The donations will be a valued gesture and by customizing each one, we show that we took time to think about and appreciate the personality of each family member.

Read more at Man Vs. Debt.