Five thoughts to think about when thinking about the speed of thought

As inquis­i­tive beings, we are con­stant­ly ques­tion­ing and quan­ti­fy­ing the speed of var­i­ous things. With a fair degree of accu­ra­cy, sci­en­tists have quan­ti­fied the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed at which the earth revolves around the sun, the speed at which hum­ming­birds beat their wings, the aver­age speed of con­ti­nen­tal drift…. These…

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Shape your environment, shape your mind

One of the biggest con­trib­u­tors to our hap­pi­ness is some­thing we bare­ly pay atten­tion to: the voice inside our own heads. As psy­chol­o­gist Ethan Kross describes in his new book Chat­ter, that voice is con­stant­ly ana­lyz­ing the sit­u­a­tions we’re in, reflect­ing on the past and future, and telling us who we are. While some­times friend­ly and…

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FDA clears first CBT-based digital therapeutic to treat substance abuse disorders

__________ The FDA just approved the first app for treat­ing sub­stance abuse (CNBC): “The app, devel­oped by a start-up called Pear Ther­a­peu­tics, is designed to be pre­scribed by clin­i­cian and used along­side coun­sel­ing. Pear’s tech­nol­o­gy dig­i­tizes a form of talk ther­a­py called cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py, or CBT, which focus­es on “exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ships between thoughts,…

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Training Attention and Emotional Self-Regulation — Interview with Michael Posner

(Edi­tor’s Note: this is one of the 20 inter­views includ­ed in the book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age) Michael I. Pos­ner is a promi­nent sci­en­tist in the field of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science. He is cur­rent­ly an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon (Depart­ment…

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Manage Stress for Your Brain Health

We just received this very insight­ful essay on stress man­age­ment and brain health writ­ten by Lan­don, a home­school­er and par­tic­i­pant in Susan Hill’s writ­ing work­shop. Susan asked her stu­dents to write about impli­ca­tions of recent brain research. Enjoy the arti­cle and the long week­end (at least here in the US) and Relax… ——————— Stress Man­age­ment for…

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Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men

Ellen recent­ly wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy! We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­o­ry, so…

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