Serving and Leadership

Liking someone can affect the way your brain processes their actions, according to scientists.

 

Researchers said that watching someone else move usually causes a 'mirroring' effect. The mirroring effect is when parts of the brain responsible for motor skills are activated by watching someone else in action.

 

The latest findings, published in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that your feelings toward the person you're watching can actually affect the activity in the part of your brain responsible for motor actions, and can for example lead to "differential processing" like thinking the person you dislike is moving slower than they actually are.

"We address the basic question of whether social factors influence our perception of simple actions," researcher Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, an assistant professor with the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC and the Division of Occupational Science, said in a statement. "These results indicate that an abstract sense of group membership, and not only differences in physical appearance, can affect basic sensory-motor processing," she added.

 

Via Sakis Koukouvis

Being overly optimistic in life puts us at risk. In addition, people who show cheerful, optimistic personality traits during childhood, have a shorter life expectancy than their more serious counter parts. On the other hand, optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than more reality-based opposites. So who’s better off in life; the optimist or the pessimist? And who’s reality comes closest to the truth?

Via Sakis Koukouvis

Your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete.

 

I would never give up the ability to record, to access, to research endless topics at the click of a button. But, with Hemingway and Socrates never far from mind, I may be slightly more cautious about how I use that ability.

The Zeigarnik effect is a powerful motivating force. And a motivated mind is a mind that is much more capable of thought and accomplishment – even if it does sometimes need to use a cheat sheet to remember just what it wanted to include, be it in a story or an order. I, for one, know that I will always prefer a waiter who writes my order down to one that remembers it—however urgently—all in his head.

 

Articles about MEMORY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=memory

 

Via Sakis Koukouvis