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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Put a Little Science in Your Life →

Brain Greene explains why sci­ence matters:

Sci­ence is a way of life. Sci­ence is a per­spec­tive. Sci­ence is the process that takes us from con­fu­sion to under­stand­ing in a man­ner that’s pre­cise, pre­dic­tive and reli­able — a trans­for­ma­tion, for those lucky enough to expe­ri­ence it, that is empow­er­ing and emo­tional. To be able to think through and grasp expla­na­tions — for every­thing from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal pat­terns con­firmed by exper­i­ment and obser­va­tion, is one of the most pre­cious of human experiences.

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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:

You can study music, dance, nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling and art­mak­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally, and you can con­clude that yes, they’re deeply bio­log­i­cally dri­ven, they’re essen­tial to our species, but there would still be some­thing miss­ing, and that thing is an appre­ci­a­tion for the work itself, a true under­stand­ing of its mean­ing in its cul­ture and context.

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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 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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