Category: ideas

“Twenty-first-century economies are rewarding those who have an unquenchable desire to discover, learn and accumulate a wide range of knowledge. It’s no longer just about who or what you know, but how much you want to know.”

Our brains change a memory a bit each time we call it up. Implanted false memories are a real thing. We may inherit memories from our parents. Outside stimuli can muck up memories more than any of us want to admit. And then there’s caffeine.

“Online communication – email, instant messaging, chat rooms, etc. – does not replace more traditional offline forms of contact – face-to-face and telephone. Instead, it adds on to them, increasing the overall volume of contact.”

The term is “p-hacking”, and it seems to lie at the heart of a growing “replication crisis” in the field of psychology – “a lack of confidence in the reality of many published psychological results.”

It may be that we’re losing some real cognitive development and memory ability.

“Even as we see technologies of a year or two ago decline, the tiniest shifts in the cool new thing merit microscopic dissection as though they will affect our great-grandchildren. If only we paid so much attention to climate change.”

“As damaging as office bullies’ unwanted attention appears to be, however, a group of researchers believes they’ve found something even more harmful to workers: no attention at all.”

“We can’t study how they got creative,” says cognitive neuroscientist Mark Beeman. “But we can see how their brains work.”

Marcelo Gleiser: “We perceive nothing in the actual present. What we call ‘the present’ is built out of the integration of many past histories. The flow of time is the succession of these integrations, disjointed but appearing to be continuous, as if life were a grand movie.”

“A first-of-its kind study reports seniors expressing high levels of cynical distrust are at a higher risk of developing dementia. This finding, discovered in a population of elderly Finns, was not entirely explained by depressive symptoms, and remained robust after various risk factors were taken into account.”