What does it mean to be a patron of the arts? Perhaps you have the means to support art innovation in your community, or maybe you are a producer of music or art and you work behind the scenes. Maybe your way of supporting art is just showing up. All of these are means of developing an artistic community and building a creative environment for future generations.
Rebecca McInroy
What’s Happening Inside Your Head When You Sleep
We need to sleep for a host of reasons, but what exactly is happening in our brains while we’re unconscious? We’ve only scratched the surface of understanding all that happens during sleep, but we do know that while our bodies are resting, our brains are very busy.
Have you ever tried to commit some skill or knowledge to memory and you magically perform better after a night of sleep? It’s not magic. One of the most significant functions of sleep is the process of memory consolidation: experiences you’ve had during the day, things you’ve started to store in your memory, become consolidated and stabilized during sleep. Different stages of sleep function to consolidate different kinds of memory, so a full night of sleep (six to nine hours on average), helps your memory function more cohesively.
Take in what professors Bob Duke and Art Markman have to say in the players above. Then have a nap, to refresh and consolidate what you’ve learned. Sleep is a lot more than just rest; do yourself a favor and get the sleep that your brain and the rest of your body needs.
Originally aired June 9, 2013.
How Metaphors Transform Simple Words Into Complex Concepts
Do you ever have those moments when you just can’t find the right words to express your thought? They happen. Articulation isn’t always easy. Sometimes, words or language alone just don’t accurately express the complexity of the thought. At those times, it can be very helpful to use an analogy or a metaphor to illustrate the fullness of the concept being expressed. Analogies and metaphors allow us to communicate complex concepts or ideas that transcend simple words.
How Our Brains Process Time
Time flies when you’re having fun, the old saying goes. But how can time – maybe the most fundamental concept of the universe – feel different under different conditions? Our brains perceive time differently in different circumstances. When we pay close attention to something, tedium can set in and it can feel like time slows to a crawl. Conversely, if our lives demand we juggle several different things at once, we tend to pay less attention to some activities – and time races by in a flash.
How Going Out is Good for Your Brain
Human beings are a social species. Our natural programming requires a certain amount of social contact with other people. Shared experiences are simply a fundamental component of our needs as humans. We don’t just have a need for direct interaction and verbal communication either – there’s all sorts of nonverbal communicative actions we take in the presence of others that we wouldn’t do alone. In this installment of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take us through the psychological benefits of “going out” and mingling with our fellow humans.
How to Crush Writer’s Block
Writer’s block! That phrase might induce panic and a recollection of a familiar experience. It’s a very common phenomenon. So what is it? When in the beginning stages of undertaking a new writing project, a writer might find themselves blocked – stuck in front of a blank page or screen with no thoughts coming to mind. This lack of creative flow is further exacerbated by anxiety over the lack of production – making it a self-perpetuating cycle that can lead to stagnation. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the ins and outs of how and why we sometimes get stuck – and what we can do to help ourselves in those difficult situations.
Why All Praise is Not Created Equal
“Hey, you’re smart!” That feels good to hear, doesn’t it? Praise always feels good, but not all praise motivates us to try new things, challenge ourselves, or deal with failure. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss how to praise in a productive and meaningful way. In summary, when giving or receiving praise, it’s a helpful skill to think about where that praise is directed.
Why Personality Tests Don’t Tell What You Need To Know
When it comes to the Myers-Briggs personality type test, are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you focus on sensing, or do you use your intuition to interpret information that you absorb? Does it matter? Why is it so entertaining and satisfying for some people to answer these questions about themselves and others in their lives? Listen to the show and let the Two Guys, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, demystify the wiry world of personality tests for you.
What’s Going On Inside the Adolescent Brain?
There are endless questions we could ask about how the brain works. A particularly interesting one: what’s unique about the brain during adolescence? During adolescence our brains are wired differently than adult brains will be – and for good reason. In adolescence our brains are in a process of development – so we’re less inhibited, allowing us to take the risks we need to learn about the world. In addition, the difference in brain physiology has other ramifications on behavior and needs. Ignoring them can make life more difficult for kids and parents.
Debunking Myths Behind Different Learning Styles
Are you an auditory learner or a visual learner? If you answered “yes” you would be right. That’s because we use all our senses to learn and process information. In this edition of Two Guys On Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke dispel the myths behind learning styles preferences: they don’t really exist. Our reliance on the theories of learning styles to explain our success or failure of understanding certain information is actually serving our human need to put things into categories – combined with our need to explain things when they don’t work.
Discussion on Behavioral Economics–Kahneman and Tversky
As human beings, we are, in fact, creatures. Like any other living organism, energy conservation is of highest priority to our vibrant being, whether we are consciously aware of that fact and its influence over our behavior or not. So, how does that affect our decisions in life? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss two great minds in psychology, and the founders of Behavioral Economics, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Does Money Really Make You Happy?
The idea that money doesn’t make you happy is easy to get behind if you have it, but if you don’t it can be a hard concept to buy into (pun intended). Yet the correlation between money and happiness is more complicated then one might think. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the relationship between money, security, opportunity, memory, and happiness.
Why We Crave Sugar
Why is it hard to have just one of those delicious slices of pound cake over the holidays? Well, it turns out it has less to do with the creamy butter and more to do with the way our brains react to those sweet white grains of sugar.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the ways our brains respond to sugar by releasing dopamine. While we may think this dopamine is supposed to make us feel good, what the chemicals in our brains are trying to do is to teach us that this sugar is a good thing and that we want more of it for our survival. This might have been beneficial to us 150,000 years ago, but with sweets in every candy dish, gas station, and coffee shop, craving sugar has its consequences.
How To Make Effective Changes in The New Year
It’s that time of the year when we resolve to drink less, exercise more, save money, etc. It may feel really good to intend to do “better” in the new year, but as Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, real change takes planning and hard work. Why is that? It turns out we have no idea why we do most of the things we do on a daily basis. And as long as our behaviors are driven by factors that operate below our conscious awareness, we may not know how to change. As the Two Guys point out, effective change can happen when we start from the outside in. When we look at our environments first we can make space and cultivate relationships that help us become best selves.
Why Attractive People Get More Opportunities
When it comes to what humans find attractive, many factors play a role. Evolutionarily speaking, we tend to be attracted to symmetry and markers that indicate health and wellness. In social terms it has more to do with what’s in fashion at a given moment. But it’s when we begin to react to attractiveness that things get tricky.
Why Creative Minds Think Alike
The part of our brains that is responsible for generating creativity evolved throughout human existence to serve a problem-solving function. If you lived in the great, wild, open world as a primitive human, and your problems were things like predators, or food security sources, or a need for shelter, what would your brain do? Your brain would concoct creative strategies to solve those problems, and that’s what our minds have built a capacity to do as we’ve evolved – create solutions. Drs. Art Markman and Bob Duke give you more of the details.
Protecting Your Brain as You Age
Whether we like it or not, time marches on. And as it does, we age. One of the most challenging realities for everyone to face in life is that we are all, inevitably, destined to grow old (if we’re lucky, that is). Aging correlates to a steady decline of functional abilities, both physical and mental. Memory and cognition peak in our early twenties, and we begin a very slow, steady decline of those functions as we near our senior years. After age 80, many bodily functions – including brain function – seem to have reached the average limit of their operation. So what can we do to preserve our brains for as long as possible?
We Can Choose Our Delusions
Merriam-Webster defines delusion as “a belief that is not true; a false idea.” But who’s to decide what is true? Being tagged as delusional carries a negative, unpleasant connotation – calling to mind straight jackets, or maybe some scenes from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” But thanks to our powers of perception – and Drs. Bob Duke and Art Markman – you can choose to change your definition of delusion. When you get down to it, much of human existence is delusional. We use our imaginations to fill in meaning, value, expectations and definitions around a small sliver of what we can actually observe in our surroundings. Our mental state – essentially our level of happiness or unhappiness – is based on how we choose to define and perceive our circumstances.
The Psychological Dynamics of Thanksgiving Dinner
For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years. While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of recentering. Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we are now. It’s a hidden way of staying in touch with the consistent elements of our identities, and it allows us to track ourselves as we develop and change.