Think you’re bad at math? You may suffer from ‘math trauma’
Even some teachers suffer from anxiety about math.
I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.
- Drawing something that you want to remember is more effective than using other memory techniques
- For older people with dementia or Alzheimer's, drawing stores memories in still-intact regions of the brain
- Even if you're terrible at drawing, it's the neurological underpinnings that make it worth a try
Study of lookalikes refutes popular personality theory
Researchers discover whether genes or social interaction shape personality.
- Scientists looked at pairs of people who looked like each other but were not twins.
- The results showed that genetics plays a stronger role in personality formation than how alike people were treated by others.
- Behaving similarly is a stronger social glue than physical resemblance.
An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have
Just like your brain.
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory?
Some perfectly healthy people can’t remember their own lives
Three study participants described their own memories as almost completely lacking a first-person perspective or involving any sense of "re-experiencing."
Psychologists in Canada think they've identified an entirely new memory syndrome in healthy people characterised by a specific inability to re-live their past. This may sound like a form of amnesia, but the three individuals currently described have no history of brain damage or illness and have experienced no known recent psychological trauma or disturbance.
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