Alter Ego

2019-09-20 03:09:07 Credit to "DK Penguin Random House" Open / Comment

2019-09-20 03:08:40 The Power of Grit: Why do you need resilience to learn?
#Learning #Grit #SuccessPsychology

There will be days when we’re tired and discouraged, and at such times it’s a challenge to follow through on what we have committed to do. Achievement is a blend of short-term and long-term decisions and actions.

Have you ever heard someone described as having “grit”? It’s a concept that psychologists have found to be linked to the way that some people sustain their effort over time, even when obstacles slow them down.

What is resilience? Psychologist Carol Dweck, pioneer of the “growth mindset,” describes it as any constructive response, be it in behaviour, attitude, or emotion, to a challenge. Resilient people are confronted by obstacles the same as everyone else, but they see the situation as a challenge, not as a defeat, and become aware of what they could do differently next time. In a 2002 study, a team of researchers (correctly) told undergraduate students at Stanford University that the brain is malleable and develops new connections when presented with challenges. These students went on to significantly outperform their peers, who had been told that intelligence is fixed by early childhood and cannot be explained.

Dweck suggests that a view of yourself as able to develop and learn tends to make people better able to survive social embarrassment, manage conflict, get the help they need, and master new things. If you encounter misfortune, don’t forget that the experience has given you an opportunity to discover something new about yourself or the situation itself. No matter what happens, finding ways to adapt and maintain your confidence is essential for success.

A major researcher in the area of “grit” is American psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth. The qualities she studies are partly about staying on your path despite setbacks, and resisting distractions: adaptability is good, but if you change your interests so often that nothing gets finished, you’re not really advancing. As she observes, you may need to be flexible, but “you also have to be good at something.” That something needs to be a “long-term passion” to be rewarding; if you find it, your focus keeps you motivated.

To stay resilient, you need a positive mindset (“I can learn, I can improve”) combined with a clear, long-term goal. Focus on something you care about, and then your quest to gather more knowledge about what you find most interesting will contribute to your success. Open / Comment

2019-09-10 05:50:19 The Role of Sleep in Learning
#Learning #Memory #Sleep

A clear illustration of developmental mechanisms involves the changing role of sleep in promoting learning and generalization. Infants spend a great deal of their lives sleeping; for example, 6-month-olds average 14–15 hours of sleep per day. This prolonged sleep serves an important function in promoting learning. However, the type of learning that it promotes changes with the maturation of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is particularly important for learning and remembering.

During the first 18 months following birth, sleep appears to promote learning of general, frequently encountered patterns, but not learning of the specifics of material only presented once or twice. In contrast, after age 24 months, children tend to show the opposite pattern: when tested shortly after napping, they often better remember the specifics of what they learned than peers who did not nap during that period; but their memory for general patterns is no better than those of peers who did not nap.

In 2014, Werchan and Gómez described mechanisms that could underlie this change from infancy to the preschool period. Their explanation was based on a major theory of memory, called Active Systems Consolidation Theory, which posits that two interconnected brain areas, the hippocampus and the cortex, simultaneously encode new information during learning. The hippocampus can learn details of new information after one or two experiences; the cortex produces abstraction of general patterns over many experiences. The two brain areas are strongly interconnected, and the theory posits that in older children and adults, hippocampal memories are replayed during sleep, which allows opportunities for the cortex to extract general patterns from the specific memories stored in the hippocampus. The mechanism works in the opposite direction as well; learning general patterns improves the retention of details of new experiences of the same type.

We can safely say that sleep is not, as many think, a waste of time but a tool to greater learning and memory capabilities. There is, now, a substantial body of research suggesting a great number of sleep benefits to learning and retention in humans. Even short naps, 15-30 min, can recharge your brain for more learning. Open / Comment

2019-09-10 05:50:07 Open / Comment

2019-09-10 05:36:28 Thank you all for participating!
It helps us a lot in creating better content.

The results of this poll, however, do not mean that we will not cover the topics that did not get the majority of votes. It simply determines a certain kind of priorities in choosing topics for the followings posts.

We wish you all a great week! Open / Comment

2019-09-02 07:17:25 Alter Ego pinned «Help us improve the content! Pick a topic that you would like to see on the channel more than any other:» Open / Comment

2019-08-29 04:28:06 Why Do We Need Free Time?
#StressPsychology

Stress is exhausting, and sometimes all we want to do in our spare time is chill out. However, research suggests that challenging hobbies may be a better way to replenish ourselves.

Do you love to paint, go rock climbing, or play chess? These and other absorbing hobbies may help you to build a better buffer against stress. In the 1970s, a team led by American psychologist Peter Lewinsohn developed a theory known as “Behavioral Activation” (BA), originally aimed at treating depression. BA may also help us to stay positive in the face of stress.

Whatever the source, stress can make life feel less rewarding. If that feeling permeates other aspects of our lives, we may withdraw from activities we usually enjoy – and reducing these rewarding experiences can, in turn, further heighten stress.

BA takes an outside-in approach to this problem: by engaging in activities we enjoy, we experience emotional rewards that lead to more positive thoughts and feelings. Under stress. It’s your best interest to keep doing what you enjoy or what makes you feel good about yourself.

An enjoyable and exciting challenge may leave you feeling even more energized than resting when you feel tired. Using your BA skills can create what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “optimal experiences” – that is, moments of flow in which you feel so engaged, powerful, and confident that the stresses of life feel less intense. Make space for challenges in your spare time: they can help you build your resilience against stress. Open / Comment

2019-08-29 04:27:59 Open / Comment

2019-08-19 05:12:03 Neuroplasticity

Some 15 years ago, if you showed me a diagram of my brain with certain areas more active than the others, I’d readily agree that it’s me, that’s who I am. If I have higher activity in areas responsible for anxiety or depression, that’s how it is; some people are more inclined to those things than the others. It’s not the case today, however. We have discovered the notion of neuroplasticity – an idea that our brains adapt to the way we use them.

Think of your brains as a normal muscle. When you use your muscles regularly, and in a specific fashion, they become more adapted to that kind of activity. Same applies to our brains. Recent research done on London taxi drivers confirms this theory.

London is a particularly tricky city to navigate. So, to become a taxi driver, one has to learn the entire city map by heart, and I tell you, that is far from an easy task. Thus, when the researchers took brain scans of London taxi drivers, they saw that regions responsible for spatial orientation and memory showed higher than usual activity. Those taxi drivers trained their brains to adapt to the difficult task of navigating in London.

#PsychFacts #PsychTerms Open / Comment