This week we learn about the effect of old misconceptions on learning new concepts, painful math anxiety, and healthy personalities.
- Students’ difficulties in grasping physics concepts are rooted in the incorrect assumptions the student develops before entering a physics course ( e.g. “motion implies a force” ). When these preconceptions are not addressed, fundamental physics concepts are likely to be misperceived or distorted to fit existing beliefs.
- People with high math-anxiety activate pain networks in their brains when anticipating doing math, but not while actually performing math.
- Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories
- Personality traits are associated with expression levels of genes that regulate inflammation and therefore may be biologically linked to how well people fight disease.
- Big Five personality traits, OCEAN/CANOE
Athanasios Athanassiadis
Thanasi is a physicist and engineer who uses light and sound to investigate how the physical world works. For his research, he has made sound with lasers for underwater sensing, built an x-ray scanner for sandcastles, and measured how jets of water can be used to move underwater robots. Outside of science, Thanasi is a passionate clarinetist, playing with a variety of Greek and Turkish groups around the Northeast.
Jaime Devine
Jaime K Devine is an interdisciplinary neuroscientist whose research focuses on how behavior and biology, specifically sleep and health, interact. She has a PhD in Neuroscience from Brandeis University and a Certificate in Sleep Medicine from Harvard Medical School. She is also a dedicated science communicator, runner, working mother and nerd.
