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Link Feast

Our editor’s pick of this week’s 10 best psychology and neuroscience links.

12 December 2015

By Christian Jarrett

A Decade of Delights
Ten years ago I launched the Research Digest blog and on Wednesday in London, we held a party to celebrate (also check out BPS President Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes’ report on the event).

Secrets of the Teenage Brain: a Psychologist’s Guide for Teachers
If being a teenager is hard, teaching them is harder. Bradley Busch at The Guardian provides four insights into the adolescent brain – and how it can inform classroom practice.

How Popular People’s Brains Are Different
A new study I covered for New York‘s Science of Us suggests there may be a self-perpetuating aspect to being one of the cool kids.

Visual Effort and Inattentional Deafness
The media have lapped up a new study, implying that it makes the novel finding that when concentrating on a visual task we become deaf to our surroundings. In fact, explains attention expert Dan Simons, this behavioural effect has been shown before (the novelty of the study was in its brain-based findings), and the press was wrong to describe the effect as “inattentional blindness”.

Screwed Up, Little Despots?
Alice Violett at The Psychologist finds the roots of the negative stereotypes about only children in the prejudice of 19th-century psychologists.

Possessed By A Mask
Every human culture has used masks for ritual disinhibition, shaming and play. Is being online the ultimate masquerade? An Aeon magazine essay by Sandra Newman.

A Paradigm Shift for the Motor Cortex?
Neuroskeptic reports on a new review paper that argues Roger Penfield’s seminal idea that the motor cortex contains a body map is wrong, or at least only half the story. In fact, argues the review author Michael Graziano, the motor cortex contains areas that encode different complex actions.

Brain Bank Dismantling, Climate Change Psychology, Trigger Warnings For Books
It’s the latest episode of BBC Radio Four‘s All in The Mind with Claudia Hammond.

A Temporary Blindness During a Wrongful Conviction
Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks unearths an extraordinary tale of psychogenic illness.

Welcome To The Club
Ella Rhodes at The Psychologist reports on the magazine’s efforts to crowdsource practical ideas for an after-school psychology club for primary school children.