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Our pick of the week’s best psychology and neuroscience links.

07 May 2016

By Christian Jarrett

Anyone Can Give a Memorable TED Talk
Rules from the head of the famed conferences: focus, connect, practice—and have something to say.

The Two Word Games That Trick Almost Everyone
Playing two classic schoolyard games can help us understand everything from sexism to the power of advertising, writes Tom Stafford at his Neurohacks column for BBC Future.

Get Angry!
After listening to a podcast on the psychology of climate change denial, artist Sasha Mirzoyan uses his frustration as inspiration for creating this picture.

Saving Science from The Scientists (BBC Radio documentary)
Alok Jha delves into dodgy data, questionable practices and genuine ambiguity to ask if human decision making is impeding scientific progress, and if anything can be done about it.

Ahhhh, PPNAS!
Stats whiz Andrew Gelman takes aim at a new study in the journal PNAS that claimed air rage incidents are more common on flights with a separate first class section. “I think we have to accept statistical incompetence not as an aberration but as the norm,” he says.

Help the National Museum of Psychology #KickstartHistory
Some of our colleagues across the pond are fund-raising to launch a museum of psychology.

The Encounter
Cognitive neuroscientist Chris Frith reflects on the nature of communication and consciousness. “Communication is not simply about the transfer of information. You can do that with a cash machine.”

How Babies Quickly Learn to Judge Adults
By Susan Pinker for the Wall Street Journal.

Imagine These Experiments in Aphantasia
Aphantasia is the inability to see mental images. “The most striking aspect of this variation in mental life,” writes Neurocritic, is that those of us with imagery assume that everyone else has it, while those without are flabbergasted when they learn that other people can ‘see’ pictures in their head”.