

Who are You, Now: Does Personality Change as We Age?
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it, says a study by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-a


Medicinal Music: Stroke Recovery
Last week, we talked about a study suggesting that listening to a Bach sonata boosts the effectiveness of a painkiller. Today, it’s more good news for music fans: we’ll be looking at how the simple activity of listening to songs helps those recovering from a stroke. The connection between the nebulously defined “music therapy” and stroke recovery is not new. In 2008, Finnish music therapist Anita Forsblom teamed up with Teppo Särkämö of the University of Helsinki for an exper