This point would not be worth making if it did not relate to another article in the same issue, “A New Vision for Teaching Science,” by J. Randy McGinnis and Deborah Roberts-Harris. They tell of “new” discoveries in science teaching—but what they recommend is exactly what traditional people do! They teach their kids through actual practice, starting with a limited range of activities and expanding outward. Kids are apprentices and doers, not mere memorizers of stray facts for multiple-choice tests. As a result, they actually learn. They have to; a Maya child (most of us who look at this seem to study the Maya) who was as ignorant of his or her environment as an urban kid in the U.S. would not last long.
E. N. Anderson
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Riverside
Happy Young, Happy Old
“Say Cheese,” by Jordan Lite [Head Lines], discusses a study in which the brightness of kids’ smiles in their childhood photographs was found to predict their future marriage success. A cheerful, spontaneous smile is a good prognosticator of a cheerful personality—this is a proverbial no-brainer. And most people find it is a real pain to be around unhappy people or even someone who seems unhappy.
How much money was paid for this “study” to determine the obvious?
“Lowndes”
adapted from a comment at www.ScientificAmerican.com/Mind-and-Brain
More on Night Owls
In “Early Risers Crash Faster” [Head Lines], Siri Carpenter explains a study in which so-called night owls got a boost in energy 10 hours after waking up that the early risers did not experience. But the article did not discuss each group’s duration of sleep. Was there a difference in the number of hours slept between the early risers and the night owls? In addition, did the researchers measure in the lab or otherwise take into account each group’s quality of sleep?
“jh443”
adapted from a comment at www.ScientificAmerican.com/Mind-and-Brain
CARPENTER RESPONDS: The researchers chose subjects who all had equivalently healthy sleep, and the study was designed to let the sleepers follow their natural, preferred sleep schedule. On the nights before the cognitive tests, each subject’s bedtime and wake time—and therefore total duration of sleep—were individually tailored to their previously stated sleep preferences (which were verified by biometric surveillance for several nights prior to their night in the sleep lab). Most subjects appear to have slept around eight hours. The complexity of this study design, in my opinion, contributes to the study’s rigor.
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3 Comments
Add CommentI've also noticed that rural people have greater knowledge of important and interesting things than city people have. I've often wondered why some of those questions are not asked on IQ tests. I suppose it's because it's not considered important by the powers that be.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisunfortunatley i don't have full access to these articles, but following your reference i came along this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"In every society, people tend to think about plants and animals in special ways that are distinct from the ways in which they ordinarily think about other things in the world, such as stones, tools or even people." Evolution and Devolution of Knowledge: A Tale of Two Biologies
Journal article by Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, Norbert Ross; Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 10, 2004
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=L1TdpXsVSQbsXQnL1FQHZ25hGbs5RlQ4kDYws54W1D72PmcvJY9W!-1986555990!1888687908?docId=5006474212
perhaps, just as the professors did better than the undergraduates, very young children of rural cultures may do better than the professors. but not as brilliantly as one might expect.
for introverts, the "social cure" might be different things like alleviating loneliness or a sense of exclusion, and doing so in ways that are variably "social". A problem with this research is that it doesn't make subtle distinctions for "social", that term is thrown about and can be taken to mean different things. There's different ways to be social, offline and online, and relationships aren't the only one (see Jane Dutton's research on positive interactions vs relationships). It might be that introverts prefer interactions , shorter in duration and less frequent than relationships or social experiences, and thus the "social cure" mentioned here seems to not work for them.
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