Category: ideas

“Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed less shrinkage in the hippocampus region of patients’ brains in the Alzheimer’s patients with higher fitness scores. In Alzheimer’s the hippocampus is one of the first parts of the brain to suffer damage. Exercise and physical fitness have been shown to slow age-related brain cell death in healthy older adults.”

“The brain is of course tremendously complex: a bundle of some hundred billion neurons, or nerve cells, each sharing as many as ten thousand connections with other neurons. But at its most fundamental level, the neuron, the brain’s structure is not difficult to grasp.”

“Why do we find musicians and singers so attractive? Looking at things from a biological point of view, we would normally expect women to be attracted to men with qualities that indicate good genes that can be passed on to her children or those that show he can look after a family, like a wad of cash for instance. Music doesn’t seem to serve any practical purpose.”

Researchers “argue that the collective wisdom of magicians, honed for millenia by the gazes of suspicious crowds, contains insights for investigators of human perception and cognition. A science of magic, they write, could take both cognitive science and magic to new heights — and that’s not all. It could help people defend themselves from the tricks of advertisers.”

“Want to build a great audience, composed of people you respect? Be picky about who you decide to overserve. Then do it with all the skill and enthusiasm you can muster.”

“Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. There is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work.”

“L Frank Baum, the writer who invented Oz, moved his family to Chicago two years before in order to be there for the opening of the World’s Fair, and his Land of Oz is buoyed by the same determined optimism of America at the turn of the century.”

“The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient … but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.”

“Through experiments and observation, social scientists have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising. As this new science of habit has emerged, controversies have erupted when the tactics have been used to sell questionable beauty creams or unhealthy foods.”

ArtsJournal’s managing editor, Doug McLennan, talks about the future of the site, and how AJ has evolved over the years. “The challenge is how do we make it easy to offer a lot of information and keep it highly curated enough to so that it is valuable for people who appreciate our judgment in choosing one thing over another.”