Category: ideas

At Harvard, a mere 42 students — “less than 1 percent of Harvard’s 6,640 undergraduates” — major in classics. “Then there’s Sanskrit and Indian studies, which has three students, and astronomy and astrophysics, with five starry-eyed souls. Although most students may deem the undersubscribed subjects impractical, the bastion of liberal arts education has in recent years begun promoting learning for learning’s sake as a worthy and enriching pursuit.”

“Six years ago Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New York, exploded the myth that gaming is bad for your eyes by showing that expert gamers outperform non-gamers at a variety of visual tasks. Now she has demonstrated that playing action-packed video games improves a person’s ability to perceive contrast, a skill we rely on in dark conditions.”

“If the institute succeeds, its maps will help scientists decipher the function of the thousands of genes that help produce the human brain. (Although the Human Genome Project was completed more than five years ago, scientists still have little idea which genes are used to make the brain, let alone where in the brain they are expressed.) For the first time, it will be possible to understand how such a complex object is assembled from a basic four-letter code.”

“Listening to finer music and attending concerts on a consistent basis makes your real age about four years younger. Whether that’s due to stress relief or other properties, we see decreases in all-cause mortality, reflecting slower aging of arteries as well as cancer-related and environmental factors. Attending sports events like soccer or football offers none of these benefits.”

“Our brains raise few objections when presented with seemingly expert guidance, new research suggests. ‘Most average people have this tendency to turn off their own capacity for making judgments when an expert comes into the picture,’ says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta.”

Researchers are finally beginning to figure out how to explain the puzzling phenomenon, thanks to a group of patients who “have dementia and experience continuous déjà vu, and also by the discovery that there is a group of people with epilepsy who have déjà vu-like auras before a seizure.”

“These days, ‘narcissist’ gets tossed around as an all-purpose insult, a description of self-aggrandizing, obnoxious behavior. Unfortunately, the same word is used to describe a quality that comes in three gradations…. Its most extreme form is narcissistic personality disorder, a psychological condition that impairs a person’s ability to form normal relationships and wreaks havoc on those who have close encounters with it.”

The very model of a modern major mainstream newsweekly has got a little list, with items like making the interstate highway system into “a highway/light-rail/power-grid nexus,” a new kind of retail outlet called a “survival store,” Africa as business hub, recycling “underperforming asphalt” in suburbia, and the return of Calvinism.