Lewis on Kahneman: The Merits of Intellectual Self-Torture | Mind Matters "As a man is," wrote William Blake, "so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers." No doubt my tumultuous childhood is a part of the reason I find long-term investment advice rather funny. "Do this for 40 years and be assured of a sound retirement." Really? Who thinks we can be sure what will happen next week across the street, much less in the global economy four decades hence? Kahneman, of course, won the Nobel Price in Economics in 2002 for his work with the late Amos Tversky, which demonstrated the predictable but non-rational ways in which human minds work. Kahneman's eye was formed in part by his childhood as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France, which was, as Lewis puts it, "punctuated by dramatic examples of the unpredictability of human behavior and the role of accident in life." Yet it's hard to believe that one's early experiences of life don't leave any trail. All in all, a fine profile.
Beautiful Places to Read in London Word recently reached us that the imposing Freemason’s Hall has a library in its belly. And thus, we began the day climbing a monumental marble staircase towards our appointment to view a poem about William Blake, enclosed in a book ‘bound in masonic ritual’. Alas, whilst the location is most beauteous, the librarians helpful, and there are many eccentric volumes to peruse, as a specialist library this repository of secret knowledge proved ill-suited for idle pleasure reading. William Blake by James Thompson, at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry Having taken our fill of Masonic memorabilia, my companions departed for their afternoon labours and I found myself ambling alone across Lincoln’s Inn Fields towards the Hunterian Museum. By appointment onlyMomentarily my unease dissipated: an empty, grand library of old books, the wooden desks still bearing holes for inkwells. Thrice thwarted, I found myself once again upon the High Street, when a friend’s recent suggestion sprang to mind.
Life's Messy. Train Your Brain to Adapt. | Think Tank What's the Big Idea? Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think that there is a cognitive basis for chronic disorganization. Organization, she says, is not just about a cluttered desk. But the plasticity of the brain means we can all learn to be better focused and more organized. Q: Can we actually reshape our habits just by thinking? Stress is designed biologically to be powerful; it takes over your brain much more than positive emotion. What's the Significance? The quickest way to deal with stress, says Moore, is to summon a positive emotion. So why do we so often fail to stick to our organizational goals? If you learn how your brain works and work with it, you can start to exercise more cognitive control over your own functioning.
“Most obscene title of a peer-reviewed scientific article” – an amusing award for a serious academic paper | Research This post was contributed by Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele, from Birkbeck’s Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication. This post contains strong language. As an applied linguist and a multilingual I have always been interested in the communication of emotion in a person’s multiple languages. One particularly interesting area is how multilinguals swear. I remember how Livia, my trilingual daughter (English, Dutch, French as first languages), aged 7, playing with a Belgian bilingual boy (Dutch, French as first languages), who, when he heard she also had English as a first language, exclaimed that he knew English too, after which he uttered Fuck you! What matters when swearing is to know how to do it “appropriately”, in other words, know the context in which certain swearwords and expressions may be tolerated or appreciated. In 2010, I published a paper: ‘Christ fucking shit merde!’
The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] Admit it: As you're reading this, you have tunnel vision — that feeling that the world is closing in on you after surfing the Internet for eight straight hours. Web dead head (yes, I made that up) is a growing concern for today's connected generation, which collectively spends 35 billion hours on the Internet every month. But we're not just talking one online shopping experience at a time. Often, we have four tabs open, cycling between emails and shopping, tweeting and word processing. SEE ALSO: Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead [INFOGRAPHIC] Turns out, multi-tasking online doesn't positively exercise our brains or mental state. Scared? Thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, Firstsignal
Giant Fish Sculptures Made from Discarded Plastic Bottles in Rio As part of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) an enormous outdoor installation of fish was constructed using discarded plastic bottles on Botafogo beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The sculptures are illuminated from the inside at night creating a pretty spectacular light show. Love this. See much more over on this Rio+20 Flicker set. (via hungeree and razor shapes)
A Biological Basis for the Unconscious? | Think Tank What's the Big Idea? Today, the question of how people make decisions is an animated and essential one, capturing the attention of everyone from neuroscientists to lawyers to artists. In 1956, there was one person in all of New York known for his work on the brain: Harry Grundfest. An aspiring psychiatrist who was born in Austria in the 1930's, Eric Kandel took an elective in brain science during medical school and found himself studying alongside Grudfest at Columbia University. “What is it you want to study?” That’s exactly what Kandel did, earning a Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine in 2000 for his discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system, which showed that memory is encoded in the neural circuits of the brain. It wasn’t clinical practice or theory that interested him. Recent studies by Helen Mayberg back up this conclusion. What's the Significance? The answer is of course, no.
Brain frontal lobes not sole center of human intelligence, comparative research suggests May 13, 2013 — Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain's frontal lobes, say researchers. Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not -- as previously thought -- disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to the most accurate and conclusive study of this area of the brain. It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes cannot solely account for humans' superior cognitive abilities. The study by Durham and Reading universities suggests that supposedly more 'primitive' areas, such as the cerebellum, were equally important in the expansion of the human brain. These areas may therefore play unexpectedly important roles in human cognition and its disorders, such as autism and dyslexia, say the researchers. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) today.
The Neurocritic Your brain on improv: Charles Limb on TED.com Live from TED2014 A first dance, on a next-generation bionic limb: Hugh Herr and Adrianne Haslet-Davis at TED2014 Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at The MIT Media Lab, strolls onto the TED2014 stage in a pair of long, black shorts. Culture When self-identity can change: Q&A with Charles Limb This morning’s TED Talk from Andrew Solomon asks a deep question about parents and children. Facts about napping “No day is so bad it can’t be fixed with a nap.” - Carrie P. Snow Researchers have found in recent years that the human body requires only as much sleep as the brain will allow it. In other words, so long as the brain is functioning at full capacity, there’s no great requirement for sleep. Here’s what you need to know about the benefits of sleep and how a power nap can help you.
Salk scientists discover previously unknown requirement for brain development Public release date: 20-Jun-2013 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Kat Kearneykkearney@salk.edu 619-296-8455Salk Institute Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have demonstrated that sensory regions in the brain develop in a fundamentally different way than previously thought, a finding that may yield new insights into visual and neural disorders. In a paper published June 7, in Science, Salk researcher Dennis O'Leary and his colleagues have shown that genes alone do not determine how the cerebral cortex grows into separate functional areas. O'Leary has done pioneering studies in "arealization," the way in which the neo-cortex, the major region of cerebral cortex, develops specific areas dedicated to particular functions. "In order to function properly, it is essential that cortical areas are mapped out correctly, and it is this architecture that was thought to be genetically pre-programmed," says O'Leary, holder of the Vincent J. [ Print | E-mail
Well-connected hemispheres of Einstein's brain may have sparked his brilliance The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain were unusually well connected to each other and may have contributed to his brilliance, according to a new study conducted in part by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk. "This study, more than any other to date, really gets at the 'inside' of Einstein's brain," Falk said. "It provides new information that helps make sense of what is known about the surface of Einstein's brain." The study, "The Corpus Callosum of Albert Einstein's Brain: Another Clue to His High Intelligence," was published in the journal Brain. "This technique should be of interest to other researchers who study the brain's all-important internal connectivity," Falk said. Men's technique measures and color-codes the varying thicknesses of subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves cross from one side of the brain to the other.
Neurotechnology: BRAIN storm A mixture of excitement, hope and anxiety made for an electric atmosphere in the crowded hotel ballroom. On a Monday morning in early May, neuroscientists, physicists and engineers packed the room in Arlington, Virginia, to its 150-person capacity, while hundreds more followed by webcast. Only a month earlier, US President Barack Obama had unveiled the neuroscience equivalent of a Moon shot: a far-reaching programme that could rival Europe's 10-year, €1-billion (US$1.3-billion) Human Brain Project (see page 5). But Obama's vague announcement on 2 April had left out key details, such as what the initiative's specific goals would be and how it would be implemented. The result was chaotic. Others describe the BRAIN Initiative as a Rorschach test — an indeterminate entity that invited each researcher to project his or her own hopes and insecurities. A big picture To the public, Obama's announcement seemed to come from nowhere; the president had never focused much on neuroscience before.