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.
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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Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
Natalie Angier explains biobigotry: “If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser [psychological conservationalist], one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.”
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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.