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Paul's latest book is Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.
In the privacy of our minds, we all talk to ourselves — an inner monologue that might seem rather pointless. As one scientific paper on self-talk asks: “What can we tell ourselves that we don’t already know?” But as that study and others go on to show, the act of giving ourselves mental messages can [...]
If you’ve ever been a part of a team in a workplace, you know that coordinating with even a single other person can quickly get, well, complicated. Now imagine having hundreds, even thousands of “teammates,” all with a hand in the same project. This kind of megacollaboration is becoming the norm in many scientific fields, [...]
It’s late spring, the time of year when school administrators arrive at work to find toilet paper festooning their offices, chickens let loose in the hallways and used tires slung around the flagpole. Senior pranks are a headache for principals and janitors alike, but before punishing the perpetrators too harshly, those in charge might pause [...]
Many of science’s most important breakthroughs, from the discovery of microorganisms to the theory of evolution, have come about through observation. The scientist’s gaze is clearly a powerful tool for making sense of how the world works. But it is not the same as “everyday observation,” as Catherine Eberbach and Kevin Crowley call the kind [...]
Call it the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later. The learning paradox is at the heart of “productive failure,” a phenomenon identified by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the [...]
To be mentally tough is to resist the urge to give up in the face of failure, to maintain focus and determination in pursuit of one’s goals, and to emerge from adversity even stronger than before. Psychologists claim that almost everyone can benefit from strengthening these skills, even those people we might consider paragons of [...]
First-generation college students — undergraduates whose parents did not attend university — have reason to be proud. They’ve made it, against daunting odds. But once they get on campus, many of these individuals struggle. First-generation students “are more likely to encounter academic, financial, professional, cultural and emotional difficulties than are students whose parents attended college,” [...]
Can an adult learn to speak a second language with the accent of a native? Not likely, but new research suggests that we would make better progress, and be understood more easily by our conversational partners, if we abandoned a perfect accent as our goal in the language learning process. For decades, traditional language instruction [...]
How do you gear yourself up for a big test, an important presentation, or any other high-pressure situation? Maybe your internal monologue goes something like this: “OK, this is really important. A lot is riding on this. Don’t screw this up. How well I do on this really matters.” Reminding yourself of the high stakes [...]
The improvisational flights of jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane are so transporting that they can seem almost otherworldly — especially when the listener is aware that these musicians weren’t following any score, but were making up their riffs in the moment. New research on what happens in the brain when we improvise, [...]
John Carter, the big-budget Disney movie that opened last Friday, has been billed as Indiana Jones on Mars. But the film boasts more than a rakish hero battling giant green aliens. It also features an invented language, Thark, devised by Paul Frommer, a linguist at the University of Southern California. Such fabricated tongues have become [...]
Turning a medical student into a doctor takes a whole lot of knowledge. B. Price Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, was frustrated at how much knowledge his students seemed to forget over the course of their education. He suspected this was because they engaged in what he calls “binge and [...]
You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: we learn by doing. But we also learn by watching. Whether it’s a salsa teacher running through a dance sequence, a tennis coach demonstrating proper serving technique or a science professor conducting a dissection in front of the class, observing an expert at work is an opportunity to [...]
So you say you have a wedding toast to memorize? A 20-min. speech you have to know by heart? A list of people’s names you absolutely must remember? Pshaw. Imagine delivering the long soliloquies of Shakespeare or the impassioned speeches of Arthur Miller or the cut-glass dialogue of David Mamet. When it comes to memorization, [...]
The history of for-profit educational ventures has not been pretty. Online colleges like the University of Phoenix have come under state and federal investigation for potentially exploitative and fraudulent practices. Kaplan University has had to defend itself against claims that it preys on the vulnerabilities of the down and desperate; its own training manual advised [...]
The hottest video on YouTube right now is a 5-minute spoken-word composition titled “Why I Hate Religion, But I Love Jesus.” Recorded by 22-year-old Seattle resident Jefferson Bethke, the clip has been viewed more than 18 million times since it was posted on Jan. 10. Bethke’s message — “If religion is so great, why has [...]
Brrriiinnng. The alarm clock buzzes in another hectic weekday morning. You leap out of bed, rush into the shower, into your clothes and out the door with barely a moment to think. A stressful commute gets your blood pressure climbing. Once at the office, you glance through the newspaper, its array of stories ranging from [...]
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice. In a groundbreaking paper published in 1993, cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson added a crucial tweak to that old joke. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Deliberate practice. It’s not a minor change. The difference between ineffective and effective practice means the difference between mediocrity and [...]
Seasons are caused by the earth’s distance from the sun. Motors and other machines use up energy. A heavier ball falls faster than a lighter one. If these propositions sound right to you, that’s only natural — they’re examples of folk science, widely-shared but faulty assumptions about how the physical world works. The prevalence and [...]
As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called [...]
