Category: ideas

“The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ. To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times.”

“Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit. Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.”

“Just as digital media have begun to change the nature of news, music and video, the emergence of e-books is causing various entrepreneurs and technologists to reconsider the kind of experience that books might one day deliver.”

“The learning process is a fumbling and painful one, administered not by teachers but through schoolyard intrigues and emotional outbursts. And in this part of our education, we are largely on our own. School is set up for one kind of learning, but when it comes to emotional matters, the assumption has always been that these are instincts we have to develop for ourselves.”

Today we accept the idea of damage from “passive smoking” – breathing the smoke of other peoples’ cigarettes. Now some public health advocates are applying that idea to the harm that problem drinking causes for bystanders – “vandalising property, urinating and vomiting in the street, attacking people including members of our own family, and causing death and injury by driving under the influence.”

“Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory. The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.”

“A university is to offer a master’s degree teaching students about social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. The £4,400 MA in Social Media will also explain how to set up blogs and publish podcasts. The one-year course at Birmingham City University will consider social networking sites as communications and marketing tools.”

“I asked a friend of mine, an inveterate punster, whether he punned while on dates. ‘Sure, I pun on dates,’ he replied. ‘On prunes and figs, too.’ And well he might, considering the similitude between puns and fruit flies, both of which die practically the instant they are born, but not before breeding others.”

“Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.”

A thoughtful look at the old Icelandic sagas shows that the Vikings practiced a low-tech but serious form of oceanography, carefully mapping the movement of currents and the riches they carried – from fish and whales to seaweed and usable driftwood.