Can Multicultural Experiences Increase Your Creativity?
Living in another culture and learning the practices of that culture may enhance the psychological processes that make people more creative. (Art Markman, Ulterior Motives, Psychology Today)

Solving Problems While Sleeping
One purpose for dreaming itself may be to help us find solutions to puzzles that plague us during waking hours. (Rachael Rettner, LiveScience)

“Hobbits” Weren’t Humans With the Disease Cretinism
“I have put that claim to rest,” says Colin Groves of the Australian National University in Canberra. (New Scientist)

New Philosophy App
Alexander George, a professor of philosophy at Amherst College, describes the AskPhil app in an Amherst press release: “When philosophical questions occur to people away from their desks or computer screens they’ll now have the opportunity through their mobile devices to see quickly whether other people have already asked that question and whether it’s received interesting responses.” (Natasha Lennard, Opinionator Blog, The New York Times)

Scientists and the Public
What science says is important, but in controversial areas, it’s only the beginning. It’s critical that experts and policy makers better understand what motivates public concern in the first place; and in this, they mustn’t be deceived by the fact that people often appear, on the surface, to be arguing about scientific facts. Frequently, their underlying rationale is very different. (Chris Mooney, The Washington Post)

More on What Scientists Think About Religion
If people of faith believe they have to become antireligious or completely secular to be a successful scientist—when this is not a full reflection of the scientific community—it would be a disaster. (Elaine Howard Ecklund, The Huffington Post)

Malaysia’s Religion-Based Reality Show
The producers of Imam Muda say they want to find a leader for these times, a pious but progressive Muslim who can prove that religion remains relevant to Malaysian youths despite the influence of Western pop culture. (Sean Yoong, Associated Press)

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Chris Mooney has an interview with Elaine Howard Ecklund, the researcher who’s been documenting the religious beliefs of academics for several years.
One of the things Mooney picks up on is her conclusion that although scientists are much less religious than the general population, it doesn’t seem to be that studying science is the cause. That’s because prospective scientists are mostly nonreligious in the first place.
I guess that’s not too surprising. There’s a considerable anti-science movement within conservative Christianity, so highly religious people are less likely to go into science in the first place. And there’s no reason to suppose that learning about science should necessarily conflict with liberal religion. After all, mainstream religions have successfully accommodated science within their worldviews, often reconstructing God as a remote figure who lets evolution and the laws of physics do most of the work (see this earlier blog post for more on that).
And yet, there is something odd going on here. Because in the United States, college is, in fact, a major nonreligious epiphany for many students. Take, for example, data from the ongoing Spirituality in Higher Education study. This study is following nearly 15,000 students through their college years. The researchers found that religious attendance plummets during college years. According to the study organizers, this drop in attendance is closely related to an increase in “alcohol consumption and partying.” A shocking indictment of college life, I’m sure you’ll agree!
But it’s not just the hedonism and freedom of college life that entices students away from religion. You can see this in some remarkable data from the Monitoring the Future study (the paper is here, but behind a paywall). University of Michigan researchers estimated how much religiosity changes for kids who do not go to college. Then they compared that with changes in religiosity over six years for kids who study a range of disciplines. The data are shown in the graph below (click on image for larger view).

Basically, for the biological and physical sciences, it’s a mixed picture, similar to what Ecklund found. Church attendance goes up, while beliefs go down. Perhaps that’s because, as they join the workforce, the kids feel under increased pressure to conform socially.
For vocational subjects, the effect is all positive. These folks come out of college more religious than you might expect—which may reflect the different natures of the colleges that teach these subjects.
But both those in the humanities and the social sciences see dramatic declines in religious attendance and even more in religious beliefs. Now, this might simply be because they were more religious to start with—but then, so were those who went into education. So I suspect that broadening worldviews is the major reason these students lose their faith, a conclusion also suggested by the fact that in the Spirituality in Higher Education Study, participation in a “study abroad program” also created increased skepticism about religion.
In other words, humanities and social sciences, much more than biological and mathematical sciences, challenge you to imagine the world though the eyes of others. And this exercise in imagination undercuts religious dogma far more effectively than any science lesson can.
As the University of Michigan researchers conclude: “Our results suggest that it is postmodernism, not science, that is the bête noir of religiosity.”

Is There Something Universal About Music?
A number of musicians, including some notable composers, claim that music is a universal form of human communication which transcends barriers of culture and language. Now psychologists are putting this universality back on the agenda, and are investigating whether certain elements of music are hard-wired into the brain. (Philip Ball, New Scientist)

Responding to Stephen Hawking’s View of Aliens
The Journal of Cosmology compiled responses from a dozen scientists and has published them online. Some criticized Stephen Hawking’s use of human behavior to predict what aliens would do, but others said that human behavior was a reasonable yardstick. Few, however, questioned the premise of Hawking’s statements—that alien life forms probably exist and we are likely someday to encounter them. (Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times)

Many Religions Link Modesty and Faith
Though the burqa and niqab have made news in recent months, Islam is only one of many religions that connect modesty to faith with specific garments. Many Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews, and Christians promote modest appearance, among men and women, to various degrees. (Neal Conan, Talk of the Nation, NPR)

New Study Finds Listening to Mozart Doesn’t Increase Intelligence
A team from Vienna University’s faculty of psychology has analyzed all studies since 1993 that have sought to reproduce the Mozart effect and found no proof of the phenomenon’s existence. (Kate Devlin, Telegraph)

Kids Overimitate Adults
Whether they’re preschoolers from Australian suburbs or Kalahari Bushmen, children copy adults to a fault, according to a new study. The findings suggest that overimitation—in which a child copies everything an adult does, even irrelevant or silly actions—is a universal human trait that may contribute to our complex culture. (Gisela Telis, ScienceNOW)

Does Studying Science Cause Atheism?
There’s a cliche out there, particularly among some conservative religious folks, that there is something nasty about science (and particularly evolutionary science), such that studying it will kill off your belief system. However, Elaine Howard Ecklund’s research seems to give the lie to this idea. (Chris Mooney, The Intersection, Discover)