Blog
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Improving Your Cognitive Toolkit
Read more: Improving Your Cognitive ToolkitThe question by the Edge Foundation: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” 163 answers are here. Here’s a sampling: – “Cognitive load” from Nicholas Carr: a limitation in how much information entering our consciousness we can process at any instant; – “The Pareto principle” from Clay Shirky: a reminder that the richest or busiest or…
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Social Animal
Read more: Social AnimalDavid Brooks pays tribute to brain science in a big New Yorker piece. Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far…
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The Mind’s Eye
Read more: The Mind’s EyeLatest by writing neuologist, Oliver Sacks is excerpted here, read from/discussed live here. A handful of Sacks’ New Yorker pieces are available in-full here. The excerpt begins like this: Dear Dr. Sacks, My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is: I can’t read. I can’t read music, or anything else. In the…
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Resilience
Read more: ResilienceOn Road to Recovery, Past Adversity Provides a Map (NYT) New research suggests that resilience may have at least as much to do with how often people have faced adversity in past as it does with who they are — their personality, their genes, for example — or what they’re facing now. That is, the…