“Tell me if this sounds familiar: you just turned off the light, your head is on the pillow, your eyes are closed, and yet, instead of drifting off to dreamland, you find yourself thinking about something that happened earlier in the day. Surprisingly, this process of reactivating your memories occurs even when you aren’t aware of it, and not only is it normal, it might actually improve your memory. As a second-language researcher, I am especially interested in harnessing this phenomenon to help people learn new languages.”
Category: ideas
Why Keeping Secrets Is So Difficult (And How To Make It A Little Easier)
“You have to pay a lot of attention both to what other people already know as well as to whether they’re allowed to know the secret information, too. This mental effort can be a problem in casual conversation, where it’s easy to let a piece of information slip unintentionally. Our minds have a limited capacity to process information.”
Two Neuroscientists Try To Figure Out A Microprocessor (It Doesn’t Go Well)
Last week, the duo uploaded their paper, titled “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” after a classic from 2002. It reads like both a playful thought experiment (albeit one backed up with data) and a serious shot across the bow. And although it has yet to undergo formal peer review, other neuroscientists have already called it a “landmark paper”, a “watershed moment”, and “the paper we all had in our minds but didn’t dare to write”.
Philosophy Doesn’t Value Oral Cultures. Here’s Why
“The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as ‘philosophy’ for the next few millennia. Why are these historical reflections important today? Because what is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of the scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.”
Our Selfish Genes – A Theory That Changed The Way We Look At Life
“Genes aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 they were simply stretches of DNA that encoded proteins. We now know about genes made of DNA’s cousin, RNA; we’ve discovered genes that hop from genome to genome, inserting themselves into a new host to be replicated there. And what by far the larger part of the genome is doing for much of the time is still something of a mystery.”
So You Think You Know Your Own Mind, Do You?
“The mid-20th-century behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle held that we learn about our own minds, not by inner sense, but by observing our own behaviour, and that friends might know our minds better than we do. (Hence the joke: two behaviourists have just had sex and one turns to the other and says: ‘That was great for you, darling. How was it for me?’)”
What Is Awe, Exactly? Psychologists Try To Figure It Out
“First, what is it? And, second, is there a way to use its emotional power in other contexts?”
You’ll Probably Marry The Wrong Person, So The Best Approach Is Pessimism
Alain de Botton: “This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.”
Look Out – Here Come The Art Robots!
“If you want your robots to get good, they’ve gotta learn—and make—art. And they’ve gotta learn—and make—funny, weird, sometimes stupid stuff.”
The Monument To Fallen U.S. Soldiers Before They Actually Fall
“To many, a memorial with nearly half of its space reserved for upcoming conflicts is an eerie statement that such conflicts and casualties are an inevitable wave on the horizon.”