The ABCDE of managing life’s challenges “Resilience is our ability to bounce back from life’s challenges and unforeseen difficulties, providing mental protection from emotional and mental disorders,” says Professor Michael Rutter, often described as the father of child psychology. A resilient person is less vulnerable to stressful events, has an internal drive, and can think…
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The science behind ‘face blindness’ Much of human engagement relies upon the ability to recognize familiar faces. And yet this seemingly simple, widespread human capacity, which builds and strengthens social bonds, is not a given for everyone. People with “face blindness”— known as prosopagnosia (from the Greek words for “face” and “without knowledge”) — find it difficult,…
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The eye-opening science behind ‘inattentional blindness’ In an iconic study from 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, researchers at Harvard University, used a gorilla costume as a prop to explore visual perception. Subjects were asked to watch a video and count the number of times players passed a basketball between a small, continually moving group of students. Partway…
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What science tells us about expertise Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers have for decades grappled with answering: what does it mean to be an expert, and how does someone become one? To theorize about human ability, science must consider whether expertise is acquired as a result of nature or nurture. Are you born with the capacity to be…
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Research is unraveling the greatest mystery of the mind Scientists and philosophers have grappled with the question of consciousness for over two thousand years. But, despite more than 7 billion humans on the planet — experiencing and aware — until recently, scientists have been in the dark regarding the feeling of life itself. Consciousness “does not appear in the equations…
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Rise of the mismatch diseases According to evolutionary biologists and psychologists, many physical and mental ailments result from a lack of fit between the environment people evolved for and the one in which they now live — known as ‘mismatch diseases.’ Over millions of years, each species accumulates a large number of evolutionary adaptations to help it survive…
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