Even though we yearn for what is new, most of us are unable or willing to make fundamental changes in our lives. <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways” title=“Set in Our Ways” Why Change is so Hard”>Change is rarely as easy as we think it will be. Our openness to new experiences typically increases during our 20s and then gradually declines until about age 60. After that, some of us become more open again, perhaps because our responsibilities for raising a family and earning a living have been lifted.
Category Archives: Linking Thinking
Skeletal Remains
Dinosaur mounts have become so fundamental to our idea of what makes a natural history museum that it can be difficult to imagine the institutions ever existing without them. So does it matter that 140 years after the first Hadrosaurus foulkii mount, today’s paleontologists have reinterpreted its reliance on four rather than two legs? Yes, says Jesse Smith:
… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowledge reflects a better understanding of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re compelled by improved understandings of those environments that have yet to open themselves to human occupation — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Understanding life in a way that either spatially or temporally transcends the presence of humans builds a context that helps us understand that presence. The fact that we have a better idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, suggests that an image of the past is fully constructible if only we’re given the right parts.
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New Tools Help Information Overload
Take a scientific question like the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. Would you prefer to plough through an essay on the subject, or to glance at the visualization created by Ben Fry in which the 75,000 letters of coding in the human genome form a photographic image of a chimp’s head? Virtually all of our genetic information is identical, and Fry highlights the discrepancies by depicting nine of the letters as red dots. No contest. Alice Rawsthorn explains why.
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EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids
Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,
said Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and director of their Neuroscience Institute. This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.
This study has been repeated many times in the last thirty years, with analogous results; this one is unique in that is sorts out the variables that people have used to discount previous studies and yet ends by asking “Can this be replicated?” For heaven’s sake. What more proof do we need?
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Google’s Gatekeepers
A sobering piece by law professor Jeffrey Rosen about the critical and reluctant role that Google’s corporate gatekeepers play in deciding what we can and cannot see as it navigates the territory between providing neutral platform for free speech and a company in the media and advertising business:
“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law professor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.
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Overload!
“The tragedy of the news media in the information age is that in their struggle to find a financial foothold,” writes Bree Nordenson, “they have neglected to look hard enough at the larger implications of the new information landscape — and more generally, of modern life.” That is, information overload. Most of us lack the skills — not to mention the time, attention, and motivation — to make sense of today’s unrelenting torrent of information. Far from precipitating the demise of journalists and news organizations, it spells out why journalism won’t disappear. Paul Duguid explains: “[Information] needs a recommendation, a seal of approval, something that says this is reliable or true or whatever. And so journalists, but also the institutions of journalism as one aspect of this, become very important.”
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Social Networks and Happiness
It seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you:
We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends — that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.
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Obama In Your Heart
Elevation is one of a class of emotions that we feel when other people do good, skillful, or admirable things. These emotions are unusual in that they are not primarily about ourselves, our goals, and our normal petty concerns; rather, they make us feel like better people. Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.” Barack Obama is apparently an off-the-charts elevation inducer. Haidt’s research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action. But he says the elevation effect is powerful nonetheless. “It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens hearts and minds to new possibilities. This will be crucial for Obama.”
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Procrastinating Again?
Procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation. Everyone occasionally procrastinates, 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away, and a whopping 80 to 95 percent of college students have a penchant for postponement. Trisha Guru covers contemporary views on and advice for kicking the procrastination habit.
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Clinical trials are broken. In her review of three recently published books about the collusion between influential doctors and pharmaceutical companies, Marcia Angell reveals the systematic biases inherent in the very scientific method designed ensure best medical practices. Knowledge translation rests on the assumption that evidence-based research must make its way into practice. Her conclusion is sickening: