Mind Center for Outreach, Research and Education

"In the past, researchers' recordings of dolphin communication have been occluded by the whirs, clunks, and splashes from boat traffic. But lately, both above and beneath the water, there has been uncommon silence." https://www.wired.com//pandemic-quiet-is-helping-humans-e/

CSU graduate student Abbie Modafferi works as a wastewater technician for the school's coronavirus testing program. "I feel like if we're really trying to slow the pandemic and help get back to normal, the biggest thing is prevention," she says. "And this is how you do that." https://www.npr.org//colleges-turn-to-wastewater-testing-i

In humans, the hippocampus keeps maturing as infants and kids age. It’s also where many of our autobiographical memories are stored, in little constellations of neurons. Any one memory probably engages thousands and thousands of neurons, he says. But that still doesn’t take up that much room, he says. When you forget something, Frankland thinks, that memory is still there, but the constellation is buried under a bunch of other stuff.... https://whyy.org//why-you-cant-remember-your-early-childh/

"But there are many studies demonstrating profound links between anosmia (the clinical term for smell loss) and clinical depression." https://www.vogue.com/article/lost-sense-of-smell-covid

Big Ideas For Strange Times: How Do We Know How Words Were Pronounced in Languages No Longer Spoken, Like Old English? https://vimeo.com/467405144

We are also using language to relieve the awfulness of pandemic life, embracing slang, puns, catchphrases, acronyms, memes, and goofy new words that blend the sounds and meanings of existing words. This process isn’t new. What is different is the scale of it, said Andrea Beltrama, a sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a social, medical, psychological, political and economic situation that affects us around the globe. It affects fun, work, relationships.... We have a clear snapshot of how language is shaped. Will the vernacular of the pandemic disappear when normalcy (hopefully) returns? It will be interesting to look back in 20 years to see what stuck and what didn’t, Beltrama said. Making a word part of the lexicon is a big step toward normalizing a completely abnormal situation. https://fusion.inquirer.com//coronavirus-lexicon-new-words

Rather than fixating on our inner worlds and woes, we can strive to promote what some psychologists call small self. Virginia Sturm, who directs the Clinical Affective Neuroscience lab at the University of California San Francisco, defines this as a healthy sense of proportion between your own self and the bigger picture of the world around you. https://www.vox.com//winter-dread-covid-19-pandemic-happin

https://www.nytimes.com//oliver-sacks-his-own-life-review.

"In grad school, I would always get anxious before talks, and because of that, I always used to prepare an insane amount for a talk, it was like, This is too much work to put in to a talk. But then my professor was like, Well, this is your superpower, it’s like your body is making you anxious because you want to be prepared, and I think reframing it like that was part of turning the microscope on myself and being like, Well, these are signals that maybe I should be liste...ning to. An interview with David Lydon-Staley, PhD Assistant Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication 10/15/20 https://mindcore.sas.upenn.edu//10/19/david-lydon-staley-/

"Don’t talk too much. The young people in your life are spending hours and hours on Zoom calls where, by logistical necessity, they’re on mute. The more we can let them unmute themselves, express themselves, and actively engage rather than passively receive, the better." https://characterlab.org/tips-of-the-week/ask-dont-tell/

You can download posters of "Who Studies Philosophy" with dozens of public figures who studied philosophy here: https://www.apaonline.org/page/diversity_resources#posters