People aren’t just bad at remembering things they see all the time, but also in actually knowing how they work. In a 2006 study, many people made significant errors when drawing a bicycle, like putting the chain around the front wheel as well as the back wheel. - The Conversation
Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation. - The Conversation
For decades, these ideologies were tolerated as part of a tacit social bargain: A group of intelligent eccentrics were left to their own devices on a patch of land in the Santa Clara Valley, and, in return, American society received an extraordinary set of new technologies. - Liberties Journal
The places and events that Didion samples in the late Sixties—a time of unpopular foreign involvements, identity-based unrest at home, and a divisive, enigmatic national government—make right now an instructive time to read Slouching. - Hedgehog Review
No matter how one defines capitalism, the concept has served its critics well. Capitalism named an enemy, gave it a shape, and showed that it was on the march, threatening everything in its path. It still does. Scholars, by contrast, have often blanched at the term, dismissing it as political or polemical. - The Nation
Part of the appeal is that calling someone resilient in the endurance sense sounds kind. It feels like encouragement rather than judgment. But communicating kindness without taking any responsibility is just a way to make yourself feel more comfortable – that everything will be OK. - Psyche
The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger. - The Guardian
The pressures on higher education seem extraordinary, even to someone like me, who is generally convinced that real change is rare, perhaps especially when it comes to America’s tried-and-tested system for replicating its élites. - The New Yorker
"I keep having conversations with grown, discerning adults whose chief metric for their enjoyment of a book, show or movie is how relevant it is, how directly it speaks, to the granular particulars of their lived experience.” - NPR
Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. - Noema
From the original, nineteenth-century form popularized by Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal to the “lyrical” variant of today, the verisimilitude that realism pursues—not just lifelikeness, but worldlikeness—is meant to convince us the novel is, for want of a better term, natural. - Boston Review
Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously. When the AI helper was suddenly taken away, these people were significantly more likely to give up on the problem or flub their answers. - Wired
The idea of photographic memory is simple and powerful: Experience is captured objectively, stored completely and retrieved perfectly. See it once, keep it forever. There’s just one problem. There’s no scientific evidence it exists. - The Conversation
We don’t value human creations solely for their beauty or their price tag. We also value them because they embody deliberate labour and expertise. - The Conversation
