دردشة الاسمر شات الاسمر موقع الاسمر اكبر تحمع فلسطيني

My work had become my mistress and my wife had had enough. What would happen to us? I couldn’t explain why, but for months, I had a gnawing sense that my life was off track. And I certainly never would have guessed the marital havoc I’d reap because of my misplaced priorities. Feeling unsettled, and with the thought that physical exercise would clear my head, one spring day I grabbed  [ Read More ]

عندما يذهب الشهداء الى النوم أصحو وأحرسهم من هواة الرِّثاء أقول لهم تُصبحون على وطن من سحابٍ ومن شجرٍ من سراب وماء أهنئُهُم بالسلامةِ من حادثِ المُستحيل ومن قيمة المذبح الفائضة وأسرقُ وقتَا لكي يسرقوني من الوقتِ هل كُلُنا شهداء؟ وأهمس يا أصدقائي اتركوا حائطاَ واحداً لحبال الغسيل اتركوا ليلةًَ للغناء اُعلِّق أسماءكم أين شئتم فناموا قليلاً وناموا على سلم الكرمة الحامضة لأحرس أحلامكم من خناجر حُراسكم وانقلاب الكتاب على  [ Read More ]

Scientists have made a breakthrough in their efforts to bring paralysed people the ability to use thought power alone to control artificial limbs, and to interact with computers and other electrical devices. John Donoghue and colleagues implanted a tiny array of electrodes into the brain of a 25-year-man who is unable to move his arms or legs following a knife wound that severed his spinal cord. The brain implant allowed  [ Read More ]

When people from different social groups mix, they generally come away with a more positive attitude towards the other social group. However, this benefit is not always symmetrical – people from a minority group are less likely to emerge with improved attitudes. It depends on how they perceive the experience, and how they perceive the dynamics between their social group and the majority group. Nick Hopkins and Vered Kahani-Hopkins have  [ Read More ]

It takes just a tenth of a second for people to make judgements about you based on your facial appearance. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov asked university students to rate the attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness of actors’ faces after looking at their photos for just 100ms. The ratings they gave the faces correlated strongly with ratings given by other students who were allowed as long as they wanted  [ Read More ]

If your attention is elsewhere you can miss something right in front of your eyes – a phenomenon that’s been dubbed ‘inattentional blindness’. For example, witnesses confronted by an armed attacker sometimes fail to remember anything else about the assailant apart from their weapon, so preoccupied were they by the knife or gun. Now Seema Clifasefi and colleagues report that just one stiff drink can exaggerate inattentional blindness, a finding  [ Read More ]

Thirty minutes exposure to a digital mobile phone can improve people’s working memory functioning, at least in the short term, according to Vanessa Keetley and colleagues at Swinburne University in Australia. The performance of 120 participants on a battery of neuropsychological tests was compared before and after they were exposed for thirty minutes to a mobile phone that was either on full power, or switched off. The phone was clipped  [ Read More ]

Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills. Helen Raikes and colleagues asked 2,581 mothers from poor families enrolled on the Early Head Start programme in America how often they read to their child at age 14, 24 and 36 months. At each time point, children read to daily, or several times a week, had a larger vocabulary. Of course  [ Read More ]

Other new research and reviews of note – A woman recovers her ability to see depth after years of stereo-blindness, thus providing further evidence of the brain’s adaptability even into adulthood. The neural basis of human dance. Autism more common than previously thought. But see here. The benefits of playing video games. Is Bush unintelligent really?

Advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience – an evolving field that investigates the relations between brain maturation and cognitive development. (Neuropsychologia). ‘Memory editing’ – a study of the interplay between those mechanisms that distort memory and those mechanisms that protect memory against distortion. (Memory). If you’re aware of a forthcoming journal special issue in psychology, please let me know.