since i'm still a bit busy getting myself back together, here is some interesting reading for you to check out in the meantime. some of these articles might be a bit dated (i was storing them in my drafts for a while before the move).
nisha cooch for brain blogger
"Whereas the neural differences in men and women may not underlie differences in mathematical ability, they may partly explain the difference in the tendency for men and women to pursue careers in STEM. Certain sex differences appear to be present from birth and are thus not attributable to cultural influences. For example, newborn girls spend more time gazing at human faces, whereas newborn boys spend more time gazing at mechanical objects. These observations are consistent with the enhanced tendency for females to process emotional information and to perform better in cognitive tasks that incorporate emotional and social information. The way such information differentially influences male and female learning is likely a result of evolution. Indeed, it has been demonstrated even in bees that reproductive success, in females specifically, is enhanced by cooperative abilities that rely on perceiving and engaging in complex social behaviors."
francesca gino for scientific american
"By relying on intuition, in fact, we can make biased decisions. To take one example, we tend to infer someone’s ability directly from his performance without adequately adjusting for the situation in which he has operated, a systematic error known as the correspondence bias. For instance, when evaluating which employees to promote, a manager might focus exclusively on their success and fail to adjust for the difficulty of their past assignments. Similarly, we might judge our leaders without factoring in market conditions, political challenges, and so on."
t.m. scanlon for ted.com
"If those who hold political offices must depend on large contributions for their campaigns, they will be more responsive to the interests and demands of wealthy contributors, and those who are not rich will not be fairly represented."
ryan chapin mach for huffington post
"In real life, there is no such thing as a "Not-Racist" - just a whole lot of people like us who are trying to navigate the complex problem of American racism. Knowing this, our job as people who care about these issues is to educate others with more compassion and less snark. Millennials already have a more progressive outlook on race than our predecessors - to make a serious impact, it's a more progressive look on racism that we'll need."
daniel yudkin and yaacov trope for scientific american
"That music can move us is no surprise; it’s the point of the art form, after all. What’s new here is the manner in which the researchers have quantified in fine-grained detail the cognitive ramifications of unpacked melodic compounds. This investigation of music’s building blocks may be more relevant than you suppose. Nowadays, experts in the production room can hone a track—the timbre, tone, rhythm, phrasing—with digital precision. These songwriters and producers are the true geniuses behind the success of popular music today, and they seem to have an intuitive grasp of the phenomena underlying the findings of this psychology article."
olga khazan for the atlantic
"Pediatricians are growing increasingly alarmed about the dangers of so-called “toxic stress”—certain kinds of childhood experiences, like turmoil, violence, and neglect, that, when chronic, can alter brain structure and chemistry and hurt a child’s chances of long-term success. Harsh parenting by itself won't necessarily doom a child, but when combined with other stressors, it might."
