Word: neuroscientists
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...Even though the Provost’s Office was created just over a decade ago, this behind-the-scenes operator is Harvard’s top academic administrator and second-in-command to the President. Former President Larry Summers tapped Hyman, a neuroscientist by training, for the Provost’s post in 2001, after Hyman had spent five years in Washington as director of the National Institute of Mental Health. He may now be a tenured neurobiology professor at the Medical School, but Hyman actually completed his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in philosophy and humanities at our beloved...
...authors of the study are reluctant to draw such broad conclusions about the gender disparities. "There are many different possible explanations," says NIMH neuroscientist Daniel Pine, who suggests a much more ordinary reason for the girls' more emotional response. "It might be possible that the girls are trying to remember what they wrote earlier [about the kids in the photos]," he says. "You can imagine a scenario where they say, 'Oh, did I write something bad about that girl?' Boys are simply doing that less." In other words, it may be that boys are cads because they're not wired...
...study, presented last year at the Cognitive Neuroscientist Society's annual meeting, psychologist and neuroscientist Helena Westerberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm compared the cognitive abilities of 45 young adults (average age 25) with those of 55 older adults (average age 65). She found that after five weeks of computerized training on tasks ranging from reproducing a series of light flashes to repeating digits in the opposite order that they were given, the older group was able to reach the same level of working memory, attention and reaction time that the younger group had at the outset. (Notably...
...increasing body of evidence has suggested that participating in mentally stimulating activity, socializing frequently and exercising may help protect against age-related decline - at least cognitive decline. As early as 1995, neuroscientist Carl Cotman, who studies aging and dementia at the University of California at Irvine, published a paper in Nature showing that physical exercise produces a protein that helps keep neurons from dying and spurs the formation of new neural connections in the brain. More recently, Cotman demonstrated in studies of elderly dogs and mice that enriching their social environment is associated with improvement in brain function...
Karpinski and Duberstein's study isn't the first to associate Facebook with diminished mental abilities. In February, Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cautioned Britain's House of Lords that social networks like Facebook and Bebo were "infantilizing the brain into the state of small children" by shortening the attention span and providing constant instant gratification. And in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small warns of a decreased ability among devotees of social networks and other modern technology to read real-life facial expressions and understand the emotional context...