Category: ideas

“Precisely why learning an instrument would have a positive impact on academic achievement has never been clear. A new study from Boston Children’s Hospital provides a possible answer. It reports musical training may promote the development and maintenance of a key set of mental skills.”

“No profound understanding of the workings of the brain is likely to compromise our appreciation of art, any more than our understanding of how the visual brain functions is likely to compromise the sense of vision.”

“Viewing paintings engages a number of different regions of the brain, suggesting art appreciation is a natural biological process, according to the report in the June issue of the journal Brain and Cognition.”

“In the case of someone who isn’t otherwise poor, poverty of time is an unpleasant inconvenience. But for someone whose lack of time is just one of many pressing concerns, the effects compound quickly.”

“Artists are apparently more likely to emerge from wombs that contain a greater concentration of testosterone.”

“What happened next—the precise manner in which flying saucers, as a concept, transferred from the mind of Kenneth Arnold to that of the nation—remains unclear.”

“You want students to close their machines and pay attention? Put them in a smaller seminar where their presence actually registers and matters, and be engaging enough—or, in my case, ask enough questions cold—that students aren’t tempted to stick their faces in their machines in the first place.”

“1883’s Practical Housekeeping demands that, when picnicking, women ‘be up at five o’clock in the morning to have the chicken, biscuits, etc., freshly baked.'” And then came the sandwich.

“Intense loyalty to one’s group needn’t produce hatred for outsiders. The key is getting the most zealous patriots and hard-core believers among us to think seriously about themselves as moral beings.”

“What Martin actually gives us is a fantasy version of what the historian Alfred Crosby called the Post-Columbian exchange: the globalizing epoch of the 16th and 17th centuries. A world where merchants trade exotic drugs and spices between continents, where professional standing armies can number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, where scholars study the stars via telescopes.”