(Source: teachingliteracy)
How a doctor’s white coat makes you “smarter” (clothes and self perception)
If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement. So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.
The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition. We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those experiences include the clothes we wear.
“I love the idea of trying to figure out why, when we put on certain clothes, we might more readily take on a role and how that might affect our basic abilities,” said Joshua I. Davis, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College and expert on embodied cognition who was not involved with the study. This study does not fully explain how this comes about, he said, but it does suggest that it will be worth exploring various ideas.
As I said before, there was always a reason behind KYM’s white lab coats that went beyond mere costume.
via Slavin
(via teachingliteracy)
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive.
[…]
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
[…]
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
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We no longer have to just take iconic writers’ words on the power of fiction. The New York Times’ Annie Murphy Paul explores the neuroscience of your brain on fiction and how narratives offer a way to engage the brain’s capacity to map other people’s intentions, known in psychology as “theory of mind.”
You Brain, On Fiction.
(via jtotheizzoe)
(Source: , via teachingliteracy)
This girl’s voice is hauntingly beautiful.
(Source: ceffystonem, via wrists)
(via wrists)
Little by little, one travels far.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
(Source: kari-shma)
Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
—A Complicated Kindness
(Source: quote-book)
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
—C.S. Lewis (via laceofpearls)
(Source: quote-book)
“Maybe you’re so careless with yourself because you’re so careful with other people.”
