Category: ideas

“There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects. Every time you challenge your brain it will actually modify the brain. We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it’s impossible.”

“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information.”

“We’re seeing the move from the sort of static idea of a copy that gets paid a certain rate to a revenue share and to a usage right which means that I am authorizing agents to give the license for the use of the music, like I always have in the past, for example with radio. I just want to collect a piece of the revenues that the other party is making rather than preventing any kind of copy.”

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as “smarts.”

New “brain-scanning studies suggest that the link between profits and power takes place in the striatum – part of the brain involved in sensing rewards. This provides the biological basis of our everyday experience that personal reputation is felt as reward.”

“As other cities look to replace their blighted downtowns with new development, Las Vegas, known for its extravagant facsimiles of European and American landmarks, has come up with an unusual approach: Build another downtown, right next to the decaying one.”

Researchers have discovered that as people perform monotonous tasks, their brain shifts towards an at-rest mode whether they like it or not.

“Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world? The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate.”

“Researchers observed test subjects’ minds going on autopilot up to half a minute before the subjects actually made mistakes, even though the subjects weren’t aware of their own lapses of attention. If the same mechanisms produce other, more meaningful errors — slips on the assembly line or behind a steering wheel — then the research could be used to design biofeedback systems that could catch mistakes before they’re made.”

“Whoever controls the image controls modern history. In today’s media world, the power of the image is almost limitless. So we need those who best understand that power to police it vigorously. Which, of course, is where art comes in. Art’s domain is the image, too. And if the image isn’t doing what it should be doing – recording the truth – then art has a creative duty to patrol and protect that domain. We need rustlers-turned-sheriffs, hackers-turned-security chiefs. We need artists as we’ve never needed them before. So, has art risen to this challenge? Is it vigorously policing the world of the image? Is it hell.”