News Desk: Steve Jobs: “Technology Alone Is Not Enough” Editors’ Note: Details from this post appeared in similar form in a July, 2011, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine, U.K. We regret the duplication of material. On January 30, 1986, shortly after he was forced out of Apple Computer (and years before his return), Steve Jobs bought a small computer manufacturer named Pixar from George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. Unfortunately, the expensive computers were a commercial flop. The survival of Pixar, and its subsequent rise, is a revealing case study in Jobs’s approach to innovation. When introducing the iPad 2 in March, Jobs summarized his strategy this way: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” This faith in the liberal arts is rooted in Job’s own biography. Perhaps the clearest demonstration can be seen in the design of the Pixar campus.
The Reinvention of the Self Just as Duman was beginning to see the biochemical connections between trophins, stress, and depression, Gould was starting to document neurogenesis in the hippocampus of the primate brain. Reading Altman’s and Kaplan’s papers, Gould had realized that her neuron-counting wasn’t erroneous: She was just witnessing an ignored fact. The anomaly had been suppressed. Despite the elegance of Nottebohm’s data, his science was marginalized. But Gould, motivated by the strangeness of her own observations, connected the dots. She would spend the next eight years quantifying endless numbers of radioactive rat hippocampi. After her wearisome post-doc, during which her data was continually criticized, Gould was offered a job at Princeton. Gould’s finding has led, via work Duman has done that builds on it, to a rash of R&D to stimulate neurogenesis in the brain. McEwen and Gould,” Duman says, “and they were showing this relationship between stress and the adrenal hormones and neurogenesis.
The Cognitive Cost Of Expertise | Wired Science In the 1940s, the Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot performed a landmark study of chess experts. Although de Groot was an avid chess amateur - he belonged to several clubs - he grew increasingly frustrated by his inability to compete with more talented players. De Groot wanted to understand his defeats, to identify the mental skills that he was missing. His initial hypothesis was that the chess expert were blessed with a photographic memory, allowing them to remember obscure moves and exploit the minor mistakes of their opponents. De Groot's first experiment seemed to confirm this theory: He placed twenty different pieces on a chess board, imitating the layout of a possible game. Then, de Groot asked a variety of chess players, from inexperienced amateurs to chess grandmasters, to quickly glance at the board and try to memorize the location of each piece. But then de Groot performed a second experiment that changed everything.
10 Tips for Women Students in Science Fields - Professors' Guide There is growing concern at American colleges about why so few women study science, technology, engineering, or math (the so-called "STEM" fields). Though women constitute more than half of undergraduates, according to a study of college students in 2009, 138,000 bachelor's degrees in STEM fields went to men, while only 88,000 went to women. A recent and quite interesting meta-study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Association of University Women (AAUW), located eight factors that contribute to the disparity between the number of female and male college students electing the sciences: beliefs about intelligence, stereotypes, self-assessment, spatial skills, the college student experience, university and college faculty, implicit bias, and workplace bias. We were interested in finding out what advice could be offered to women in male-dominated, STEM fields. 1. 2. 3. [View U.S. 4. 5. 6. [See 15 Ways to Boost Your Confidence at College.] 7. 8. 9. 10.
15 Ways to Boost Your Confidence at College - Professors' Guide It's easy to feel a lack of confidence at college. Lectures with hundreds of students can make one feel no bigger than a worm. And even smaller classes can make you feel low when it seems like the student in the front row has all the answers. Luckily, like every other skill, confidence can be learned and increased over time—especially if you follow our 15 practical tips: 1. Turn off the little voice. 2. 3. 4. Extra Pointer. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. ©2010 Professors' Guide LLC.
The Brain: Use it or Lose it by Marian Diamond Welcome to New Horizons for Learning - a leading web resource for identifying and communicating successful strategies for educational practice. The Johns Hopkins School of Education does not vet or endorse any information contained on the New Horizons website. Information posted on New Horizons prior to January 1, 2014 can be repurposed as long as the repurposing party provides attribution to the original author of the material being used. Information posted on New Horizons after January 1, 2014 is considered open access information and can be repurposed without attribution to the original author. Our first journal issues feature articles on neuroscience, creativity, counseling, technology, data-driven decision making, museum education, arts integration, special education, early education, cultural literacy, action research, Universal Design, international exchange programs, higher education, teacher preparation and more: New! Vol.X No. 2, Special Edition: Focus on Autism Vol. It's Here!
Why Does Beauty Exist? | Wired Science Over at the always excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong summarizes a new investigation into the neural substrate of beauty: Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki from University College London watched the brains of 21 volunteers as they looked at 30 paintings and listened to 30 musical excerpts. All the while, they were lying inside an fMRI scanner, a machine that measures blood flow to different parts of the brain and shows which are most active. The recruits rated each piece as “beautiful”, “indifferent” or “ugly”.The scans showed that one part of their brains lit up more strongly when they experienced beautiful images or music than when they experienced ugly or indifferent ones – the medial orbitofrontal cortex or mOFC.Several studies have linked the mOFC to beauty, but this is a sizeable part of the brain with many roles. On the one hand, it’s not exactly shocking that beauty can be sourced to the cortex. But why does beauty exist? Photo: Courtesy of aclintonb, via Flickr
Need to Create? Get a Constraint | Wired Science One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is poetry. At first glance, the art seems to be defined by its liberation from ordinary language – poets don’t have to obey the rules of syntax and punctuation. A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. To test this hypothesis, the psychologists ran several clever experiments. (In contrast, those subjects not first exposed to an obstacle insisted that the picture contained an A, H, S and E. PS.
Leonardo's To-Do List : Krulwich Wonders... Here's something you can't do every day: How about you and I slip into Leonardo da Vinci's head for moment? Deep in. Thanks to historian Toby Lester, we can. In a book soon to be published, Lester says Leonardo used to travel with a small notebook hanging from his belt, and "whenever something caught his eye," he would make a note, or begin "sketching furiously." "It is useful," Leonardo wrote, to "constantly observe, note, and consider." I know what my To Do list would look like, and it would look nothing, not even remotely like this one. Here's what was on his mind, stuff he wanted to do. Wendy MacNaughton for NPR What a jumble! Maybe he went in and out, plunging into a task that concentrated him fully, and then, once done, he'd spring back to the rough and tumble of Anything Goes. Another giant, Michel Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wrote that no single idea could hold him. I like being drunk like that. The Benefits Of Not Focusing Dimmi, Dimmi, Dimmi... A very hungry mind.
Marcel Proust: neurocientífico (entrevista a Jonah Lehrer) Antes de que la neurociencia revelase algunas verdades nada evidentes sobre el funcionamiento de nuestro cerebro, muchos artistas y pensadores intuyeron, cada cual a su manera y en su parcela predilecta de reflexión y expresión, aspectos esenciales de nuestra naturaleza cuyo conocimiento preciso requeriría todavía mucha investigación y experimentación por parte de los científicos. Se anticiparon en la comprensión de funciones cognitivas como la memoria, el lenguaje y el aprendizaje, cuestiones tan trascendentes como la relación cuerpo-mente, la libertad y el sentido del yo, o el funcionamiento íntimo, asociado a sus ilusiones, de los sentidos de la vista, el oído y el gusto. Ha sido un neurocientífico exquisitamente literario quien se ha decidido a señalar a estos precursores en un ensayo que tiende nuevos puentes entre las dos culturas. Jonah ha tenido la amabilidad de respondernos unas preguntas, preparadas por Antonio Gimeno y un servidor. En ingles: 1. 2. Uncertainty is abhorrent. 3. 4. 5.
The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order » Absolutely No Machete Juggling Brace yourselves, what follows is an amazingly long blog post about the best order in which to watch Star Wars. First, let me say this: for people that couldn't care less about the prequel trilogy, I suggest Harmy's Despecialized Editions. They are 720p videos that are the result of "Harmy" from The Original Trilogy forums painstakingly reconstructing the theatrical releases of all three films utilizing a wide variety of video sources as well as custom mattes. So, with that out of the way, what can you do if you do wish to involve the prequel trilogy? Whatever your reason, if you are showing someone the official editions of Star Wars for the first time, you have to make a decision about which order to watch the films. There are two obvious options for watching the Star Wars saga. There are two critical flaws with both of these orders, unfortunately, that prevent either from being appropriate. So neither order really works. What Gets Removed? What a Twist!
The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever | Wired Magazine Photo: Dwight Eschliman Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late. The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger—a young bride returning home from her wedding. Mitchell couldn’t get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. Pushing to remember a traumatic event soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us—it reinforces the fear and stress. Miraculously, that worked. In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. Mitchell was right about one thing, though.