idealawg

Entertaining reviews of some of this year's self-help books

For a touch of cynicism, a dab of sarcasm, and a big dose of humor, read this article from Mail Online. From "Things can only get better - right?":

New Year, new start, brand new you. Yes, I’m afraid so. Its that time of year when the relentless message pumped out by the publishing industry is that whoever you are and whatever you are doing, it simply isn’t good enough.

...

Even glancing along the self-help shelves would shred the confidence of a minotaur. There are books for depression, anxiety, nerves, therapy, personal skills, motivational skills, hostess skills, life skills and how to look good in a tulip skirt skills - even if you can’t unless you are Kate Moss. There are manuals on how to be rich, how to be thin, how to be a better you. There are books that drip with emollient homilies, titles that are rich in emotional wisdom, everything for everyone who ever suffered from a twinge of doubt.

Several books are reviewed (or skewered). Here's the review of one of my least favorite books of any genre and of all time:

"True North: Navigating for the Transfer of Learning in Legal Education"

Abstract:

As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how an equitable doctrine like unclean hands applies to a particular torts problem in one class, only the smallest percentage will then see the potential application for the doctrine in a contracts course with another professor. Fortunately, research in “transfer of learning” offers the legal academy tools to help students encode knowledge – whether doctrine or skills – in such a way that they know better when and how to retrieve it for later use.

This Article is the first to offer legal educators a comprehensive approach to the transfer of learning across the entire curriculum. It is also the first to

Article: "Lawyers Running from the Legal Profession"

Click to read the article from Lawyers Weekly. Excerpt:

There are very good things happening in the legal profession, despite a general sense of doom and gloom. A legal education is still a prized asset in the business world and an excellent method of intellectual development. Advances in the protection of civil and human rights are progressing. Legal interpretation and evolution of the law as a discipline flows. I see fulfillment and pleasure in the law.

When I decided to read the book Running from the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Profession by Deborah Aaron, I was apprehensive that I would only be reading an indictment of the legal profession and the clarion call for all of us to chuck it and go find ourselves in areas other than the law.

Click to read the rest of "Lawyers Running from the Legal Profession."

Listen to neuroscientists talk about how magic works: They'll answer your questions 'til 1/12/11

The book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions made #1 on my list of top favorites of 2010. Click to listen to an interview of the authors at PRI's The World Science. From the Web site:

Why are our brains so susceptible to illusions?

How do magicians use humor to perform tricks?

What do artists like Leonardo Da Vinci have in common with magicians?

Join the conversation with Macknik and Martinez-Conde. They’re taking your questions through January 12, 2011.

Change Blindness: British illusionists Derren Brown tests people’s attention in this video. Click below to watch the video and tell us, would you notice the swap?

AAAS: A Sociologist and a Journalist Assess How Science and Religion Get Along

News release (American Association for the Advancement of Science):

Although nearly a quarter of Americans think scientists are hostile to religion and about 30% of scientists surveyed by a Rice University sociologist consider themselves atheists, the true picture of what scientists think about religion and spirituality is more complex than popular conceptions, the sociologist told a recent AAAS gathering.

Elaine Howard Ecklund, who surveyed nearly 1700 natural and social scientists at leading research universities and conducted in-depth interviews with 275 of them, said that nearly half of the scientists identified with a religious label and even 22% of the atheist scientists in her survey expressed feelings of spirituality about nature and the mysteries of the world.

Ecklund spoke at a 15 December session co-sponsored by the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion and the AAAS Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology. She was joined by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, religion correspondent for NPR, who spoke of her own experiences covering science and religion and discussed what she viewed as some similarities between scientists and journalists in their approach to religion.

“Americans have a love-hate relationship with science,” Ecklund said. She noted their admiration for figures such as Albert Einstein and their interest in new scientific discoveries. But surveys have also shown that as many as half of Americans believe that “we depend too much on science

9th annual conference on neuroscience of mindfulness: March 30-April 3

Jointly sponsored by University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, "Investigating and Integrating Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society" will be held this spring in Norwood, MA. Click for the brochure [pdf].

I attended this year; the highlight for me was meeting engaged people who are involved in so many diverse projects involving mindfulness. For an example, click here. The format is that of a very standard conference: Lecture after lecture after lecture. Although you do hear about the latest research, the presentation styles are, for the most part, not brain-friendly (a bit ironic). I was exhausted by the end.

And I do recommend that, if you have an interest in the topic, you attend at least once. Attendance is a rite of passage.

If you see the words "brain-based," run

Professor Danlel Willingham is both cautious and myth-busting in his writings about neuroscience and learning. I have posted about him before (see links below), and have often recommended his book Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

Today was his last blog post at "The Answer Sheet" in The Washington Post. (You may follow him on Facebook here.) From that last post titled Willingham: 3 brain facts every educator should know:

Neuroscience can contribute to education—it has already done so, especially in our understanding of reading and why some students have difficulty learning to read. Pick up a copy of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education and you'll see more examples. ...

But most of what you see advertised as educational advice rooted in neuroscience is bunkum.

How can you tell the difference between bonafide research and schlock? That's an ongoing problem and for the moment, the best advice may be that suggested by David Daniel, a researcher at James Madison University: “If you see the words 'brain-based,' run.”

Click to read the rest.

Past posts about Professor Willingham:

Appreciation and optimism: How to engage in positive gossip

Posted here with permission from the author.

POSITIVE GOSSIP

Copyright © 2010 by Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. You may share this handout. Contact: [email protected] or Tel: (801) 261-1412

Homer Simpson once said, “If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?” If everyone knows gossiping is bad, why do people do it? The answer is simple. We humans spent most of our history in small tribes, and it is vital in a small group to know whom you can trust. We have an inner gossip-interest part of our brain and we like to hear about other people.

Unfortunately, bad is about three times more powerful and interesting than good. It is just how Mother Nature has made our brains. So naturally most of our gossip is about people’s shortcomings and failures. In this essay, I propose we outsmart Mother Nature and gossip positively. Positive gossip will lift your own spirits, it will make other people like you more, and it will eventually get back to the person you gossiped about and inspire her or him. Everyone benefits from positive gossip. Ask yourself, where would you rather work, a place where people stab each other in the back or a place where people say nice things behind your back?

Let’s look a bit further into this topic:

First, give yourself a challenge to engage in positive gossip. Try it out. Make a point of saying nice things behind the backs of your co-workers. How does it make you feel? When we do something nice, it is one

Age Is Just a Number: Believe You’re Younger and Your Health Will Follow

News release (Association for Psychological Science):

Maybe age really is just a number. How young or old someone feels has a huge influence on their health and how other people view them. An article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews the research and suggests that feeling young can actually make you look young—and have the health of a younger person, too.
 
Harvard psychological scientist Ellen Langer has been studying how the mind influences the body for over three decades. In one classic study, she had old men live in a retreat that was retrofitted to look like it was 20 years earlier, while they pretended that they were living in that year. “Their minds were in the past. Their vision improved, their strength improved, and so on,” she says. Langer cowrote the new article with Laura M. Hsu of Harvard and Jaewoo Chung of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
In one study by Langer and her colleagues, women had their hair cut and dyed at a hair salon, and volunteers looked at before and after pictures of the women. Those women who believed having their hair dyed made them look younger actually did look younger after the salon visit, according to the observers who were shown photos

Taking the perspective of others: Overview of presentation by Jason Mitchell at this year's NeuroLeadership Summit

Over at Brains on Purpose™, I have posted about the research of Jason Mitchell because I think it is helpful to keep in mind about homophily (i.e., the in-group/out-group or birds-of-a-feather phenomenon). Because of my past references to his research, my eye was caught when I saw that Mitchell was one of the presenters at the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit.

A question Mitchell addressed was how one may better take the perspectives of other people. From the summary of his talk:

Jason Mitchell is the head of the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University. He uses functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to study how we infer the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of others (i.e., how we mentalize), as well as how we reason about counterfactual experiences. During Jason’s session on Day 1 of the 2010 Summit he explored the subject of “Making Sense of Others”.

...

We are veracious [sic] mind readers and are constantly trying to make sense of others. In every day life we are very readily, almost continuously, tracking the various mental states of those with whom we engage.

...

So is there anything we can do to promote more of this overlap between self and other, to increase activity in the brain region to promote and encourage our brain to see a person as similar to us?

One way to increase the overlap is through explicit attempts to take that persons perspective. Jason suggests that by thinking for 1-2 minutes about what that person’s perspective might be like, what that person’s internal subjective experience might be like, you can subsequently demonstrate all sorts of pro-social effects.

Click to read the rest (NeuroLeadership Summits Blog).