Interest Fuels Effortless Engagement
Think back to a time when you were completely engaged in an activity. Maybe it was reading a comic book, or catching up with an old friend.
Beautiful Minds
Insights into intelligence, creativity, personality, and well-being
Where do Savant Skills Come From?
There's a scene in the 1988 movie Rain Man in which Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) recites a waitress's phone number. Naturally the waitress is shocked.
The Mind of the Prodigy
Prodigies dazzle us with their virtuoso violin concertos, seemingly prescient chess moves, and vivid paintings. While their work would be enough to impress us if they were 40, prodigies typically reach adult levels of performance in non-verbal, rule-based domains such as chess, art, and music before the age of 10...
What Do IQ Tests Test?: Interview with Psychologist W. Joel Schneider
W.Joel Schneider is a psychologist atIllinois State University,dividing his time equally between the Clinical-Counseling program and the Quantitative Psychology program.
Can Cognitive Training Make You Smarter?: Interview with Author Dan Hurley
Dan Hurley is one of my favorite science journalists. Not only does he write about issues that interest me, but he doesn’t sacrifice the nuance, or the humor.
Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?
Working memory and fluid reasoning: same or different? It depends.
From Evaluation to Inspiration
We live in a culture saturated with evaluation. In school, we learn to take tests. We take the tests, and depending on the outcome, either feel really smart or really stupid.
Standardized Achievement Tests: What Are They Good For? Hint: Not Cognitive Ability.
It’s well known that good standardized test takers also tend to have high cognitive ability. That’s not a shocker. But until recently, very little research has looked at the effect of improving standardized achievement test performance...
Do Painters Peak at the Golden Mean?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. – John Keats The golden mean, or divine proportion, has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and scientists for centuries...
Conversation on Daydreaming with Jerome L. Singer
Jerome L. Singer is the father of daydreaming. His seminal research over the past 50+ years with his colleagues (including John Antrobus and Eric Klinger) has laid the foundations for virtually all current investigations of the costs and benefits of daydreaming and mind wandering (see “The Origins of Positive-Constructive Daydreaming” and “Ode to Positive Constructive [...]..
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A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
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Exploring and celebrating diversity in science.
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