Category Archives: Linking Thinking

Linking to what others are thinking about learning as a way to explore how we learn online.

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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 of 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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The Stupidity of Dignity →

Steven Pinker dis­misses dig­nity as a basis for bioethics dis­cus­sions in bio­med­ical research, which US con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious lead­ers are invok­ing to dis­miss poten­tially life-saving med­ical advances. Unfor­tu­nately “over­ween­ing hubris” char­ac­ter­izes most for­mal dis­cus­sions of real revolutions:

In every age, prophets fore­see dystopias that never mate­ri­al­ize, while fail­ing to antic­i­pate the real rev­o­lu­tions. Had there been a President’s Coun­cil on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Inter­net, since it would inex­orably lead to 1984, or to com­put­ers “tak­ing over” like HAL in 2001. Con­ser­v­a­tive bioethi­cists pre­sume to sooth­say the out­come of the quin­tes­sen­tially unpre­dictable endeavor called sci­en­tific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free soci­ety, only emerge as hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple weigh the costs and ben­e­fits of new devel­op­ments for them­selves, adjust­ing their mores and deal­ing with spe­cific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fer­til­iza­tion and the Internet.

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Dare To Be Yourself →

Real­iz­ing an authen­tic life can be painful, exhaust­ing, seem­ingly impos­si­ble, and one of our deep­est psy­cho­log­i­cal needs. Psy­chother­a­pist and for­mer monk Thomas Moore on the role that fail­ures in play under­stand­ing self: “Peo­ple carry around a heavy bur­den of not feel­ing authen­tic because they have failed mar­riages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve dis­ap­pointed every­body, includ­ing them­selves. When peo­ple think of these as just fail­ures, as opposed to learn­ing expe­ri­ences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made. That dis­own­ing cre­ates a divi­sion that becomes the sense of inauthenticity.”

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Does your brain have a mind of its own? →

Why can’t we stick to our goals like “I will lose weight” or “I plan to fin­ish this arti­cle before the dead­line. “Nice thoughts, but not for­mu­lated in terms that your ances­tral, reflex­ive brain might under­stand,” says psy­chol­o­gist Gary Mar­cus. The work around? “Trans­late those abstract goals into a form your ances­tral sys­tems – which traf­fic largely in dumb reflexes – can under­stand: if-then. If you find your­self in a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion, then take a spe­cific action.”

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Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? →

The spac­ing effect posits that the best time to study some­thing is at the moment you are about to for­get it – an insight that was use­less in the real world, until Piotr Woz­niak intro­duced Super­Memo.

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Death of the Guidebook: Lost in a Cutthroat World →

Chris Tay­lor calls “desk updates” the travel guide­book industry’s “dirty secret.” “In times past, the only way to research a guide­book was to actu­ally go there — the alter­na­tive, pla­gia­ris­ing another guide­book, was, and still is, dif­fi­cult to cover up. Today, you can sit at home and Google the town you might oth­er­wise be explor­ing on foot, and hope­fully some ran­dom blog­ger has done the leg­work for you.” But the dirty part is not the fact that they stayed at home, it is the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the source of their exper­tise and the betrayal of their read­ers’ trust. They should learn from the best blog­gers: write every­where (includ­ing from home), bor­row from every­one, give credit where it’s due, and add value to the con­ver­sa­tion from your own gen­uine experiences.

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