Links to current stories related to the brain and the mind. Click on the titles to read the full stories.
Talent vs. Practice: Why Are We Still Debating This?
Scott Barry Kaufman (SciAm)
Practice does not make perfect. The now-famous 10,000-hour rule was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But subsequent studies have debunked the idea that the number of hours you put into practicing a skill is a better predictor of your eventual success than the amount of talent you start out with. But it isn’t an either/or situation, either.
Kaufman says:
All traits, including the ability to deliberately practice, involve a mix of nature and nurture. In fact, there is no such thing as innate talent. That’s a myth that is constantly perpetuated, despite the fact that most psychologists recognize that all skills require practice and support for their development– even though there are certainly genetic influences (which influence our attention and even our passions).
Like All Animals, We Need Stress. Just Not Too Much
Richard Harris (WLRN Miami FL)
Stress can lead you to an early grave, but stress can also save your life. In fact, we can’t live without it. Stress also helps us pay attention and remember things. And a life without any kind of stress would actually be boring.
We tend to assume that modern life provides us with more stress than our ancestors had to deal with, but that’s just another assumption (like the idea that all stress is bad for us).
It’s not like stress is mounting up in our modern age—it’s just [that] the flavor of it is changing. –David Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of The Compass of Pleasure.
And that flavor isn’t changing as much as you might think [Harris says]. Our poll finds that over the past year, the major causes of stress in Americans are still those age-old troubles: illness, disease and the death of a loved one.
Study Cracks How Brain Processes Emotion
(Science Daily)
A Columbia University study conducted by Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel H. Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, and Adam K. Anderson concludes:
Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people.
Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language.
If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex.
Well, maybe someone will come up with a dating service that includes neurological testing to determine whether both prospective partners demonstrate “similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex” when enjoying the same activities or eating the same kind of food.
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