Digital Literacies: Reading Signs Along The Way
How Our Internal Clock Ticks
Time helps us to infer relationships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. But our ability to perceive time and use time is rather faulty. We regularly misestimate seconds, minutes and hours by 15% to 25% in either direction. We see and move within an optimal now period, about 2 1/2 seconds long (give or take 1 to 2 seconds). Neurosurgeon Jamshid Ghajar also makes this interesting claim: You can explain a lot of pathologies, including schizophrenia, autism and ADHD, as problems of time perception.
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On Teasing and Playful Provocation
Survival of the fittest is often misinterpreted to mean survival of the most cutthroat. But fitness means so much more than that. In this interview, Dacher Keltner points out that kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice are also vital to the tasks of evolution. And so is teasing, which surprised me because we tend to be against teasing of any sort in our schools and workplaces. Keltner calls teasing the art of playful provocation
and suggests that we use our playful voices and bodies to provoke others to avoid inappropriate behaviours:
Teasing (in the right way, which is what most people do) … is a way to play and express affection. It is a way of negotiating conflicts at work and in the family. Teasing exchanges teach children how to use their voices in innumerable ways — such an important medium of communication. In teasing, children learn boundaries between harm and play. And children learn empathy in teasing, and how to appreciate others’ feelings (for example, in going too far). And in teasing we have fun. All of this benefit is accomplished in this remarkable modality of play.
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In the Ants’ Footsteps
For those who rarely give ants a second thought, Tim Flannery offers immediate relevance for anyone interested in the trends now shaping our own societies. In his book review of Superorganism, he points to the striking parallels between the progress of human evolution and the progress of ants some ten million years earlier:
Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants … leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture .… One can hardly help but admire the intelligence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intelligence of a very particular kind.
Nothing in the brain of a worker ant represents a blueprint of the social order,Holldobler and Wilson tell us, and there is no overseer orbrain castethat carries such a master plan in its head. Instead, the ants have discovered how to create strength from weakness, by pooling their individually limited capacities into a collective decision-making system that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own democratic processes.
How To Save New Brain Cells
There may be some neurological truth to those claims that memorizing lists or daily Sudoku encourages mental limberness. Even more importantly, the results lend some support that people in early stages of Alzheimers disease may slow their cognitive decline by keeping their minds actively engaged. Tracey J. Shors maps some of the promising territory that connects learning, memory and neurogenesis (the process by which new neurons are generated).
Just How Slow is Your Perception?
We are always living nearly one-half second in the past. Now, it isn’t surprising that there is some delay between an event and our becoming aware of it. This is the normal unfolding of cause and effect. And this might not be a concern if we were just passive spectators, watching the world unfold before us like a film. But given that we must also respond to events, neuroscientist David Eagleman wonders, will you perceive the event that kills you?
The Gospel According the Darwin
Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. If evolution is the true story of why we all exist, then why is there any doubt to its veracity? Richard Dawkins tackles the “evolution is just a theory” narrative, which implies evolution is merely an unfalsified scientific hypothesis, with this practical definition of truth:
Evolution is true in whatever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we conduct our day-to-day conversations? Or fill in a census form: “What is your sex?” “The hypothesis that I am male has not so far been falsified, but let me just check again”. As Douglas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well. Yet the philosophy that imposes such scruples on science has no basis for absolving everyday facts from the same circumlocution. It is in this sense that evolution is true – provided, of course, that the scientific evidence for it is strong. It is very strong.
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