Psychologyspeaking topic
The central executive: the 'boss' system that decides what gets our attention starts making silly mistakes when it tires. What is mental fatigue, really?
— Baddeley, central executive
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
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- Watching a horror film, your heart genuinely races and your palms sweat, even though you 'know' you're safe. If the brain is smart enough to tell fantasy from reality, why does it put the body on real alert? Why can't knowing switch off feeling?
- In East Asian languages the number words are short and perfectly regular (eleven is 'ten-one', twelve is 'ten-two'), and children who count in them master counting and mental arithmetic earlier. Is being good at math partly a matter of which language you count in?
- Learning a new language, we learn a new self along with the words; multilinguals report 'I'm more polite in French, more assertive in English'. Same body, same soul, but the personality shifts with the language. Is what we call our self partly a role handed to us by the language we happen to be speaking?