Category: ideas

“Previous research has shown that increased input from the cortex to a brain area called the striatum allows for faster responses. Brain scans of the volunteers showed that the young people had significantly stronger connections between these two areas. This suggests that the older group might be unable to respond swiftly simply because they cannot make good use of the striatum.”

“The initiative aims to create a series of so-called “serious games” that’d help analysts improve their objectivity and reasoned judgment when confronted with complex or culturally foreign scenarios.”

“The brain, the computer, and the economy: all three are devices whose purpose is to solve fundamental information problems in coordinating the activities of individual units – the neurons, the transistors, or individual people. As we improve our understanding of the problems that any one of these devices solves – and how it overcomes obstacles in doing so – we learn something valuable about all three.”

The field was “swept aside in the 1960s by the rise of social and then cultural history, which regarded talk of ‘the American mind’ as code for ‘the mind of white, male Americans who happened to write books.’ Today, however, a new breed of young intellectual historian is aiming to integrate the spirit of ‘history from below’ with an approach that doesn’t chop American history off at the neck.”

“There is evidence of counting that stretches back five millennia in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. Yet even by the most generous definition, a mathematical conception of nothing – a zero – has existed for less than half that time. Even then, the civilisations that discovered it missed its point entirely. In Europe, indifference, myopia and fear stunted its development for centuries. What is it about zero?”

“Plants respond to environmental factors. We’ve known this for a very long time. They will turn toward or away from the sun; they will sway with a passing breeze. But more and more, science has been telling us that the awareness goes much deeper, that plants have a kind of sentience. Does that mean they have consciousness? If they have consciousness, can they suffer?”

“It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.”

So why are atheists “among the least liked people … in most of the world,” in the words of a research team led by University of British Columbia psychologist Will Gervais? In a newly published paper, he and his colleagues provide evidence supporting a plausible explanation.

What art, or which artists, from 2011 will humans remember in centuries to come? (The Observer squares off with Slate, with U.K.-tilted results.)

“The invention of printing not even 600 years ago spread the technique of handwriting.” Are we losing it now – and should we regret that?