Monthly Archives: May 2008
Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
David Sloan Wilson on designing the Humanities Initiative, a course conceived to cross the cultural chasm between the sciences and the humanities, bringing together the strengths of both mindsets to issues in evolutionary biology, and to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning:
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Perceived Moral Blame Can Change the Memory of a Crime
The interesting outcome of Pizarro's study shows that people's memory of facts can be distorted by changing details about an individual's character. If the subjects thought Frank was a good guy, they remembered the bill at being $55; if they thought he is a bad guy, they remember the bill was $65.
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Blogging–It’s Good for You
The neurological underpinnings surrounding the therapeutic benefits of expressive writing are not clear. What is clear is that people coping with cancer diagnoses and other serious conditions are increasingly seeking--and finding--solace in the blogosphere.
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Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
Some brains do deteriorate with age. But for most aging adults, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention and sifting through a clutter of information that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact like a name or a phone number. This is a good thing.; it may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.
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Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme
Pat Shipman explores the ironic legacy of Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (1976): "The benefit to science of 'The Selfish Gene' in triggering a new understanding of the magnificent complexity of evolutionary processes must be weighed against the harm the book has done in provoking a backlash against science.
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The Cognitive Age
David Brooks explains that economic change is not the product of globalization, but rather a skills revolution in the Cognitive Age:
The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?
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Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower
Carefully structured training in working memory based on a variation of the Concentration card game leads to improvements in fluid intelligence--the kind of mental ability that lets us solve new problems without having any previous experience, and that had been widely believed to be an imutable trait.
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Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
What is the connection among habits, creativity and innovation? When we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
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Blogs, Public Intellectuals and the Academy
While the dominant trope about public intellectuals is that they ain't what they used to be, Daniel Drezner is relatively bullish:
Over time the academization of intellectual output created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals. The proliferation of blogs reverses that trend in several ways. Weblogs have facilitated the rise of a new class of non-academic intellectuals....For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy – and expand beyond the academy.
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The New Paternalism
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein articulate an approach to designing social and economic policies that incorporates an understanding of people's cognitive limitations: policy makers should nudge people into making good decisions.
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