Category: ideas

A research team at the UK Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit has developed what its leader calls “the ultimate test of intelligence.” (Test included at link)

“As much as we stake our identity on such core beliefs, it’s unlikely we emerged from the womb as little liberals or libertarians.” Yet one evolutionary psychologist “has come up with a fresh framework that links political orientation with the way we seek to fulfill our most fundamental human needs.”

“There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. … The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic. … They are at the core of many Africans’ understanding of themselves and the world.”

“The time taken to ‘fall in love’ clocks in at about one-fifth of a second, not the six months of romantic dinners and sharing secrets some might expect. Also, 12 areas of the brain work together during the love process, releasing euphoria-inducing chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopressin. Love’s high is similar to cocaine’s rush.”

“Half a century ago the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow bemoaned the estrangement of what he termed the ‘two cultures’ in modern society – the literary and the scientific. These days, there is some reason to celebrate better communication between these domains, if only because of the increasingly visible salience of scientific ideas.”

Studies in the UK and US found that children who scored higher in intelligence before age 16 tended to consume more alcohol as adults. “So why do smarter kids end up drinking more? Hypotheses abound.”

“The idea that moral behaviour is dependent on brain function presents a challenge to our usual ways of thinking about moral responsibility. Indeed, neuroscientific evidence has been found to exert a powerful influence over decisions by judges and juries.”

“Think carefully if you are considering heading to this corner of Wiltshire – the market town that gave us philosopher Thomas Hobbes is aiming to become Britain’s capital of thought,” the equivalent of Hay-on-Wye to the country’s literary scene.

“The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.”

“Although the eureka moment is such a cliche, big new ideas almost never get born like that. Innovation is one of those cases where the defining image, all the rhetoric and all the assumptions about how it happens, turn out to be completely backward.”