ADHD and Music: Why Background Beats May Boost Study Focus

 Summary: A new study explored whether young adults with ADHD are more likely to listen to background music during daily tasks. The survey, involving over 400 participants, found that individuals with ADHD prefer listening to music—especially stimulating music—while studying or playing sports.

This contrasts with neurotypical individuals, who tend to listen to music more passively, such as when relaxing. The findings suggest that music may help people with ADHD achieve optimal arousal levels for focus, opening new avenues for non-pharmacological support.

Key Facts:

• Study Behavior: Young adults with ADHD are more likely to listen to background music while studying and playing sports.
• Stimulating Sounds: Individuals with ADHD prefer energizing music over relaxing tunes, possibly to boost cognitive performance.
• Potential Support Tool: Music

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Why Can’t We Remember Being Babies?

Most of us can’t recall our earliest years, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. A recent study published in Science offers fresh insights into why these memories elude us, suggesting that babies do form memories, but accessing them later in life is the challenge. Researchers at Yale University, led by cognitive psychologist Nick Turk-Browne, used functional MRI (fMRI) to scan the brains of 26 infants aged 4 to 24 months. The infants were shown unique images, and their hippocampal activity—a brain region critical for memory—was monitored. When shown the images again alongside new ones, babies with higher hippocampal activity during the initial exposure spent more time looking at the familiar images, indicating memory formation. This effect was stronger in infants over 12 months, pointing to a developmental trajectory in memory encoding.

Historically, infantile amnesia was attributed to an underdeveloped hippocampus, but this study challenges that view, showing that even young infants can encode episodic memories—specific recollections of events. So, why don’t these memories persist? Turk-Browne suggests they may still exist in the brain but become inaccessible due to a mismatch between how memories are stored in infancy and how we retrieve them as adults. Factors like rapid neuron growth in early childhood, which disrupts memory circuits, or the shift from crawling to walking, which alters how experiences are contextualized, may contribute. Supporting this, a 2023 Science Advances study on mice showed that early memories could be reactivated in adulthood by stimulating specific neurons, hinting that human memories might also persist but remain locked away.

Ongoing research, including Turk-Browne’s work with home videos from a baby’s perspective, suggests these memories may linger until around age six before fading. Cultural factors also play a role: studies show that children in cultures with rich oral traditions, like New Zealand Māori, recall earlier memories, possibly due to frequent reminiscing with caregivers. While the mystery of infantile amnesia isn’t fully solved, these findings highlight that our earliest experiences shape us, even if we can’t consciously revisit them.

 

Borderline Personality Disorder and Projected Self-Loathing

  
Individuals with symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) often lash out hurtfully at others. This may be in response to provocation such as frustration, disagreement, or disappointment, or it might seem to be unprovoked. The lashing out often takes the form of saying hurtful things or committing destructive acts toward those they are closest to. Understanding this behavior as an expression of their disorder will offer you tools to relate without being hurt by these episodes.
Hurtful lashing-out behaviors are common in those who suffer from BPD. This typically happens when they become frustrated because they cannot get their way or when others disagree with them, which they experience as being offensive. These episodes are sometimes initiated by the symptomatic person with a phone call, email, or text.
Following is a typical example of seemingly unprovoked lashing out. Tim answers his telephone on Sunday morning and speaks to his mother who has symptoms of BPD.
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Why children perceive time slower than adults

  
Children's perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.
My household is absorbed in debate over when time goes the fastest or slowest.
"Slowest in the car!" yells my son.
"Never!" replies my daughter. "I'm too busy for time to go slow, but maybe on weekends when we are on the sofa watching movies."
There's some consensus too; they both agree that the days after Christmas and their birthdays dawdle by gloomily as it dawns on them they have to wait another 365 days to celebrate once more. Years seem to drag on endlessly at their age.
It's a feeling I remember well; the summer holidays filled with water play, skipping on the freshly cut lawn, the laundry drying on the washing line whilst the Sun blazed. At moments like that, time really did feel like it moved slowly.
Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology who studies cognitive development at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, believes children and time is a hugely understudied topic. Her work has long probed whether there is something fundamentally different about time processes in children, such as an internal clock that functions at a different speed to that of adults. But there are still more questions than answers.
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How Mindfulness Can Help You Become More Humble

There's an old story about a sage who lived in a lofty  mountain hermitage. It was attached to a cave where he often meditated, but his  followers and benefactors had also built him a lovely little building that  housed all his books and provided him with a very comfortable place to sleep  and a dining area with a sweeping view of many valleys below and peaks in the  distance. Also attached to the building was a closet-like dwelling for his  faithful attendant.

One morning the sage declared that he would like to go down  to the village to exchange some of his tattered books for new ones and see what  newly minted works of philosophy he could get his hands on. Reaching the  village required crossing a rope bridge strung high above a gorge. As they  approached the entry to the bridge, the attendant hesitated. He rarely  interrupted his master, who loathed having his contemplative silence broken,  but this time he felt he must speak up, knowing that his master's eyesight had  been weakened by so much reading. "Master," he broke in, "I fear the bridge  needs to be repaired. The rope looks very frayed to me." Perturbed, and eager  to get to the village, the sage responded brusquely, "How would you know? It  seems perfectly fine to me."
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Groundbreaking new study determines the cause of ADHD

According to the World Health Organization, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is estimated to affect approximately 5% of children worldwide and 2.5% of adults. 
This disorder manifests as inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and difficulty focusing, and it can greatly influence a person's academic and social functioning. 

Although ADHD has been recognized to have a genetic basis, the specific genes implicated have been challenging to identify.However, recent advancements have brought us closer to unraveling this mystery.
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Strange Illusion Shows The Human Brain Mess With Time to Maintain Our Expectations

 

'I saw it with my own eyes' is something people often say. The implication is that since we perceived something, it must have happened.

But what we perceive can be influenced by a great many things, and a strange new experiment shows just how easily our perceptions can be manipulated by our own expectations and assumptions.

In a new study, scientists discovered a "novel perceptual illusion" that effectively reorders the perceived temporal order of events in a sequence.

"Is our perception of time and temporal order a faithful reflection of what happens in the world (or at least what arrives at our retina) or can seemingly higher-level expectations, such as [presumed] causality, affect the order in which we experience events occurring?" writes a team of researchers led by first author and experimental psychologist Christos Bechlivanidis from University College London.

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