the timeless + the cutting-edge

Category: Cognition

  • Learning a New Language Is Beneficial to the Brain
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    Learning a New Language Is Beneficial to the Brain

    For most people, learning a second language is a practical decision: career advancement or immigration. What tends to get less attention is what the process is doing to the brain in the background. But there are many benefits of learning a new language that can change the brain structure. Over the past decades, research on…

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  • What if Your Anxiety Actually Starts in the Gut?
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    What if Your Anxiety Actually Starts in the Gut?

    The breakthrough came quietly in psychotherapist Julie Chen’s practice, buried in what seemed like routine patient complaints. For months, she’d noticed a pattern: patients struggling with treatment-resistant depression often mentioned digestive issues. Bloating after meals, chronic stomach pain, irregular bowel movements… Those details that might have been dismissed as stress-related side effects just a decade…

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  • Do We All Have a Built-in Fortune Teller?
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    Do We All Have a Built-in Fortune Teller?

    Patricia noticed it first during her morning commute. As she walked down the familiar path to the subway, her hand automatically reached into her tote bag for the MetroCard—except she had switched to the Metro company’s new digital wallet App. Her fingers closed around the air, and for about 300 milliseconds, she petrified. “Am I…

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  • Attention Works by Turning Distraction Down Not Off
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    Attention Works by Turning Distraction Down Not Off

    Have you ever been deep in conversation at a loud party, only to snap your head around the moment someone across the room whispers your name? This isn’t a glitch in your focus; it’s a sophisticated “backend” antenna at work. That antenna is the attention working at the backend. In the 1960s, psychologist Anne Treisman…

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