Mindframe

It’s graduation season, and that means it’s time to celebrate the grads in your life, revel in their accomplishments—and prepare yourself to wedge into some uncomfortable seating for a speech about the importance of uncovering your passion in life. The “follow your dreams” talk has died down a little since the economic collapse of the late aughts. Still, remain in the orbit of a recently graduated high schooler long enough and you will still hear some well-meaning adult deliver advice to the same effect. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” “Find what you’re passionate about and the rest will follow.” It’s as inevitable as potato salad at a summer cookout. However, some psychologists now suggest it may be less nutritious. Recently, researchers from Stanford and Yale-NUS college (a collaboration between Yale and the University of Singapore) administered a series of tests to look at what they call “implicit theory of interest.” https://qz.com/13...

Horses are remarkable creatures. 47 million years ago, their evolutionary ancestor was just two feet tall at adulthood. Anatomically speaking, their “wrist” is located at the joint that looks like a knee, while the rest of each leg is technically a finger. It’s been reported that two draft horses working together can pull triple the load of one horse. And despite their reputation for not being terribly bright, like any other pack animal they have the ability to discern each other’s emotions—something your irritating co-worker still can’t seem to do. Now, researchers at the University of Tokyo are conducting tests to see if horses can also read the emotions of nearby humans. Are riders right when they claim that their horse seems to know just how they’re feeling, or do we simply see what we want to see in their big brown eyes? For that matter, how would such a test possibly be structured? You can’t give a horse a questionnaire, and fMRI machines are definitely no...

  How do you listen to music? I don’t mean “Are you a headphones person or more of a speaker fan?” I mean, what parts of your brain do you use? “The same parts of the brain everyone else uses,” you may be tempted to say. But hold on: it’s a little more complicated than that. It turns out that highly empathetic people experience music more deeply than the rest of the population, and there’s a neuroscience reason why. About 20% of the population is considered highly empathetic. These folks are unusually attuned to the emotions of the people around them. They may be overwhelmed by crowds, loud noises, or unusually needy or talkative people . But there are benefits, it seems—and not just the benefits associated with being able to read situations more accurately. In a study —the first of its kind—by Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and UCLA, 20 UCLA undergrad students climbed into an fMRI machine and listened to passages of music either familiar or unfamiliar to t...

Are you likely to fall for a made-up government conspiracy? That depends: how well-informed are you? If you said “very”…bad news, you might be another chump. What gives? A recent study by Joseph Vitriol and Jessecae K. Marsh of Lehigh Unversity found that people who are overconfident in their grasp of the political world are the most likely to also buy into the existence of shadowy organizations and secret connections. Vitriol and Marsh had the study participants rate their understanding of a series of public policies. But here’s the kicker: the subjects then had to provide the most detailed possible explanation of how those policies actually worked. They then had the option to re-evaluate themselves. Many of the participants, bluff called, had to concede—perhaps a bit sheepishly—that they didn’t know as much as they’d thought. However, for some, the act of piecing together an explanation only strengthened their belief that they really got the whole pict...