Labeling Emotions Helps Control Them

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.” When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the ...

 Martin Cooney's Invention of the Incubator

In 1896, inventor Martin Cooney designed the incubator, a device veloped to aid premature babies. Cooney was the first to advocate separation of infants from their mothers as a medical procedure for the health of the child. In a bizarre combination of medicine and sideshow. Cooney gathered hundreds of premature babies (they were easy to obtain because doctors assumed premature infants would die), put them into incubators, and exhibited them at various expositions and fairs in Amer¬ ica and E...

 Characteristics of Junk Science

The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation—a basic requirement for scientific literacy… A second telltale sign of junk thought is the appropriation of scientific-sounding language without underlying scientific evidence or logic… A third important element in ...