Mindframe

For adults, the benefits of meditation are no mystery. As the Mayo Clinic notes , meditating has a whole host of upsides, from lowered stress to increased self-awareness to reduced negative emotions to a spark of extra creativity and intelligence.   Even the United States Marines—not a community known for their love of New Age-y practices— have begun using meditation training to help boost decisiveness and clear-headedness in times of conflict. But while you make an effort to incorporate more guided relaxation techniques into your daily routine, don’t forget about the children in your life, writes Alice G Walton in Forbes . Whether a kid needs some help calming down before things reach tantrum territory, or strategies for not getting so stressed about homework and tests, studies are increasingly showing that meditation can be an important aid at any age. While we still have less overall data about the benefits of meditation on the developing brain, David Gelles of T...

Since the days of Hippocrates, science has struggled to quantify human personality, and group the seemingly infinite combinations of traits into a number of discrete “types”. However, it’s difficult to design a personality-sorting scheme that produces replicable results. In the case of the now oft-derided Myers-Briggs, even beloved systems have earned harsh criticism from the scientific community. Now, from Northwest University, a new study led by Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering has crunched data from more than 1.5 million participants to devise a brand-new way to categorize personality. The subjects were a self-selecting group of internet users willing to answer one of several different online questionnaires developed over the years. These surveys contained between 40 and 200 questions, designed to measure the degree to which each respondent demonstrated five widely agreed-upon personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness...

  Is there someone in your life with an unusually short fuse? Maybe you’ve witnessed a co-worker repeatedly go ballistic on the printer whenever it runs out of ink, or maybe you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a boss who is a yeller, trapping you in meeting after meeting full of angry rants. Well, according to a new scientific paper from the University of Western Australia, this person most likely has another, connected trait: they’re not as smart as they think they are. Yes, in contrary to the age-old legend of the temperamental genius with a stormy, high-trigger attitude, the study found that “trait-anger” (that is, people who experience anger as a part of their everyday disposition) is linked with narcissism, and thus an inflated sense of one’s abilities. Undergraduates from Warsaw, Poland answered questions designed to assess their trait-anger, emotional stability, and narcissism. They were asked to rate their intelligence on a 25-point scale—and then they too...

The Bengalese finch is what happens when for 250 years, people breed the white-rumped munia for its snowy plumage. It’s paler than its wild counterpart, more social. And although its genetic architects (bird breeders) weren’t selecting for singing skills, the Bengalese finch has a farmore complex, varied song . That last bit has some fascinating possible implications, concerning how we developed our own unique speaking abilities. The capacity for complex communication requires a wide variety of skills. You don’t just need to be able to recognize and respond to certain cues; in order to parse the meanings of new or unfamiliar cues, you also need to be able to guess at the other party’s intent. This is not something most wild animals have the bandwidth to do. For instance, wild foxes and wolves can’t recognize what it means when a person points to something. No amount of training will pass on the understanding. However, domesticated animals are the result of many generations of ...

For parents of young children hoping to boost their offspring’s language skills, the solution might be simpler than you think: talk to them. And then, crucially, let them respond to you. Rinse and repeat—and repeat, and repeat, as much as you can. In a recent article from the Journal of Neuroscience , researchers studied 40 healthy young children (27 male, 13 female) between the ages of 4 and 6 across a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Of course, 40 kids is not a large enough sample size to draw any definitive conclusions, but the study does offer an interesting place to start. The scientists found that early language exposure is a pretty good predictor of white matter connectivity between two key language-related parts of the brain, known as Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area . Broca’s area handles the movements necessary to produce speech, while Wernicke’s area aids in understanding speech, and selecting accurate words to verbalize thoughts. However, not just ...

Good news for those of you who make it a point to stay physically active: a recent experiment may suggest that regular exercise decreases the effects of age-related memory loss. In a study published in the journal Cortex , a group of young people (18 to 31 years old) and a group of older folks (55 to 74) each completed a memory test and a fitness test. To determine their memory chops, the participants had to essentially practice attaching a name to a new face—frequently a vexing task for people of a certain age. Instead of meeting strangers, they viewed pictures of unfamiliar faces, each attached to a name they had to learn—all while observed in an MRI machine. The fitness test involved walking and running on a treadmill; by measuring the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in their inhalations and exhalations, researchers could ascertain what’s called the cardiorespiratory fitness of each subject. While overall the young ones had an easier time with the names...

It’s an old stereotype that women can pick up on social nuances that men can’t. Ask a neuroscientist whether women are more adept at interpreting feelings from looking at people’s faces, and you’ll get a resounding yes. Or possibly, a resounding no. It turns out that it really depends which neuroscientist you ask. To pick one example , in 2009, Olivier Collignon and his team from the Université de Montréal Centre de recherche en neuropsychologie et cognition (CERNEC) hired actors to portray the fear or disgust in front of 23 men and 23 women, all between the ages of 18 and 43. Participants then had to categorize each performance by emotion. This study found that women completed the assignment more accurately. Women also responded faster when judging the faces of other women. However, that sample size of 46 might raise a few eyebrows when it comes to stating any solid, sweeping conclusions about the sexes. On the other hand, a 1986 metanalysis by Peter Shapiro and Steve...