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.
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
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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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.