News

Consciousness: The Great Illusion?

2011-07-07T20:44:00Z

By Alison Gopnik, the New York Times

An excerpt: Humphrey, an emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, may not have solved the mind-body problem, and there is something to be said for the awkward geekery of philosophical analysis and experimental data. But he has some really interesting and original ideas about consciousness.

Many philosophers say it’s impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that’s not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It’s just that they haven’t explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

For example, why does the moon look so much larger when it’s at the horizon than when it’s overhead, at the zenith? This is a question about conscious experience — about how the world looks to us — not about behavior and brains. And there is a clear and convincing evolutionary explanation.

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The Limits of Intelligence

2011-07-07T20:37:00Z

By Douglas Fox, Scientific American

An excerpt: ... One might think, for example, that evolutionary processes could increase the number of neurons in our brain or boost the rate at which those neurons exchange information and that such changes would make us smarter. But several recent trends of investigation, if taken together and followed to their logical conclusion, seem to suggest that such tweaks would soon run into physical limits. Ultimately those limits trace back to the very nature of neurons and the statistically noisy chemical exchanges by which they communicate. “Information, noise and energy are inextricably linked,” says Simon Laughlin, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. “That connection exists at the thermodynamic level.”

Do the laws of thermodynamics, then, impose a limit on neuron-based intelligence, one that applies universally, whether in birds, primates, porpoises or praying mantises? This question apparently has never been asked in such broad terms, but the scientists interviewed for this article generally agree that it is a question worth contemplating. “It's a very interesting point,” says Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist who studies neural coding of information at the University of Pennsylvania. “I've never even seen this point discussed in science fiction.”

Intelligence is of course a loaded word: it is hard to measure and even to define. Still, it seems fair to say that by most metrics, humans are the most intelligent animals on earth. But as our brain has evolved, has it approached a hard limit to its ability to process information? Could there be some physical limit to the evolution of neuron-based intelligence—and not just for humans but for all of life as we know it?

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Laughter Leads to Insight

2011-06-10T18:45:00Z

By Elizabeth King Humphrey, Scientific American MIND

Stumped by a crossword puzzle? Try taking a break to watch a funny TV show. Recent research shows that people in a lighthearted mood more often have eureka moments of sudden inspiration.

Karuna Subramaniam, then at Northwestern University, and her colleagues found that boosting the mood of volunteers increased their likelihood of having an aha! moment that helped solve a word association puzzle. Those who watched a Robin Williams comedy special did measurably better at the task using insight than those who watched a quantum electronics talk or a scary movie. The games, in which players must find a word that connects three seemingly unrelated words, have been used for decades to demonstrate creative problem solving.

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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

2011-06-10T18:38:00Z

By Benedict Carey, The New York Times

Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations). He clicks on one and the screen flashes to tell him whether he’s right or wrong and jumps to the next problem.

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Buddhism and the Brain

2011-05-09T14:29:00Z

By David Weisman, Seed magazine

Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. I’m sorry to say I have been privately dismissive. One hears this sort of thing all the time, from any religion, and I was sure in this case it would break down upon closer scrutiny. When a scientific discovery seems to support any religious teaching, you can expect members of that religion to become strict empiricists, telling themselves and the world that their belief is grounded in reality. They are always less happy to accept scientific data they feel contradicts their preconceived beliefs. No surprise here; no human likes to be wrong.

But science isn’t supposed to care about preconceived notions. Science, at least good science, tells us about the world as it is, not as some wish it to be. Sometimes what science finds is consistent with a particular religion’s wishes. But usually not.Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.

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Memories Are Crucial for Looking Into the Future

2011-05-09T14:24:00Z

By Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine

The past and future may seem like different worlds, yet the two are intimately intertwined in our minds. In recent studies on mental time travel, neuroscientists found that we use many of the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision our future lives. In fact, our need for foresight may explain why we can form memories in the first place. They are indeed “a base to build the future.” And together, our senses of past and future may be crucial to our species’ success. Endel Tulving, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, first proposed a link between memory and foresight in 1985. It had occurred to him as he was examining a brain-injured patient. “N.N.,” as the man was known, still had memories of basic facts. He could explain how to make a long-distance call and draw the Statue of Liberty. But he could not recall a single event from his own life. In other words, he had lost his episodic memory. Tulving and his colleagues then discovered that N.N. could not imagine the future.

“What will you be doing tomorrow?” Tulving asked him during one interview. After 15 seconds of silence, N.N. smiled faintly. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you remember the question?” Tulving asked.

“About what I’ll be doing tomorrow?” N.N. replied.

“Yes. How would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about it?”

N.N. paused for a few more seconds. “Blank, I guess,” he said. The very concept of the future, seemed meaningless to N.N. “It’s like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair,” he explained.

On the basis of his study of N.N., Tulving proposed that projecting ourselves into the future requires the same brain circuitry we use to remember ourselves in the past.

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The Trouble With Teens

2011-04-07T17:56:00Z

By Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine

3/24/11

Excerpt: Teenagers are a puzzle, and not just to their parents. When kids pass from childhood to adolescence their mortality rate doubles, despite the fact that teenagers are stronger and faster than children as well as more resistant to disease. Parents and scientists alike abound with explanations. It is tempting to put it down to plain stupidity: Teenagers have not yet learned how to make good choices. But that is simply not true. Psychologists have found that teenagers are about as adept as adults at recognizing the risks of dangerous behavior. Something else is at work. Scientists are finally figuring out what that “something” is.

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Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?

2011-04-07T17:52:00Z

By Colin McGinn, The New York Review of Books

3/24/2011

Excerpt:

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?

Is thinking what the brain does in the way that walking is what the body does? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes. He is a brain psychologist: he scrutinizes the underlying anatomy of the brain to understand the manifest process of the mind. He approvingly quotes Freud’s remark “Anatomy is destiny”—only he means brain anatomy, not the anatomy of the rest of the body.

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With a "Wearable" PET Scanner, Two Realms of Brain Science Merge

2011-03-15T17:03:00Z

By David Zax, Fast Company

Brain scanning techniques, like MRI and PET, have opened new provinces of neuroscience. It's nearly impossible to read an article about the brain without seeing the familiar heat maps featuring which parts of the brain "light up" during a given task. But there's a certain fundamental problem with brain scanning. Brain scans are supposed to tell us about how our brain normally behaves--but is there anything normal about lying under a giant machine scanning our brains?

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Tea, Shortbread, and 3 Things Worth Knowing

2011-03-15T16:55:00Z

By Shawkat M. Toorawa, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Then I saw the crystal poet / Leaning on the old sea-rail; / In his *** lay death, the lover, / In his head, the nightingale."

I cited those lines in an introductory course I taught last year, one that attracts potential Near Eastern-studies majors from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University and students from other disciplines: pre-meds, engineers, "hotelies," and others searching for a literature class, looking for a break from requirements, seeking an elective, or simply trying to find a way to broaden their knowledge of culture. I didn't wonder that none of the 24 students immediately got the reference, but when I told them the lines were about John Keats (death is his tuberculosis, the nightingale his splendid ode), I was truly surprised that several of them had no idea who he was. Ah, bitter chill it was.

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Aristotle- The Banker's Best Friend

2011-02-09T19:56:00Z

By Martin Sandbu, The Financial Times

January 13, 2011

Aristotle took a dim view of business. Sometimes, of course, business people give the impression of being equally unconcerned with Aristotle’s main concern: living a good life. Just witness the grilling Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, received this week from UK legislators angry at his bank’s bonuses. Yet today’s corporate titans would do well to pay the Greek philosopher more respect than he did to their predecessors. Indeed, reading his works may be one of the best investments they can make.

Aristotle was not against a certain degree of greed, especially in the context of managing a household: household heads accumulate possessions for their usefulness. But he saw the aim of commerce simply as increasing wealth without end, or making money for the sake of accumulation. Aristotle admonished those who were “serious about living, but not about living well”. Mr Diamond would probably not have escaped his scorn.

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Grasping Another’s Point of View at an Early Age

2011-02-09T19:49:00Z

By Sindya N. Banhoo, The New York Times

Infants as young as 7 months have the ability to perceive and understand another person’s point of view, according to a new study in the journal Science. Previously, it was thought that this ability, known as “theory of mind,” did not develop until age 3 or 4.

“Younger children have difficulty keeping track of complicated scenarios,” said Ansgar Endress, a cognitive psychologist at M.I.T. and one of the study’s authors. So instead, Dr. Endress and his colleagues used a simple scenario to test the perceptive abilities of infants and adults.

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Barry Schwartz: Using Our Practical Wisdom

2011-01-07T17:12:00Z

Barry Schwartz, TED Talk

A summary: In an intimate talk, Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely.

See the talk.

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Test Your Insight- Interactive Feature

2011-01-07T17:07:00Z

From the New York Times

A summary: Scientists have found indications that your ability to jump to intuitive answers — what they term the “Aha!” moment — may be affected by your mood. After watching a humorous video, brain imaging and test results of subjects suggested that a positive mood prepares the brain’s insight.

View the feature.

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The Collected Wisdom of Great Leadership Gurus

2010-12-14T17:19:00Z

By Harvey Schachter

The Globe and Mail, 12/1/2010

Lao Tzu, Freud, Elizabeth I, and Marx are an unlikely quartet of leadership gurus. But they are a sample of an eclectic group of writers and leaders whose words are captured in Harvard University professor Barbara Kellerman’s compilation Leadership: Essential Selections On Power, Authority and Influence.

The book, which evolved from a course she teaches called “Leadership Literacy,” is a throwback to the past, when leaders-to-be were schooled on great writings and thought, rather than the latest utterances of management consultants. She views her collection as the leadership classics: “Every single selection is about leadership or is, of itself, an act of leadership. Every single selection has literary value – not always aesthetic value, but always, necessarily, value in the use of language on leadership. Every single selection is seminal: It changes forever how and what we thought and/or how and what we did.”

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Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving

2010-12-14T17:10:00Z

By Benedict Carey

12/6/2010, The New York Times

The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes.

The payoff of tackling a mental exercise: leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis.

But who wants to troll?

Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.

And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source.

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Literacy for Love and Wisdom: Being the Book and Being the Change

2010-11-22T15:42:00Z

Brochure available at this website:

Literacy for Love and Wisdom Conference- Summer 2011

Contact Bruce Novack at brucenovak-at-mac-dot-com for additional information.

Scenes of Thought: The Brain in Pictures

2010-11-09T20:16:00Z

From New Scientist

November 5, 2010

What does your mind look like? A new book, Portraits of the Mind by Carl Schoonover, looks at how scientists have visualised the brain through the centuries.

An excerpt: In 1875 the physician Camillo Golgi invented the reazione nera (black reaction) cell-staining technique, which allowed anatomists to view individual neurons in their entirety for the first time. Potassium dichromate and silver nitrate are added to preserved nervous tissue, and the neurons become visible as tiny silver chromate crystals form inside the cells.

Golgi used the technique to make detailed neuronal maps, such as this drawing of a dog's olfactory bulb, made in the year he discovered the reaction. The technique became widely known as "Golgi's method" and marks the beginning of modern neuroscience.

View the slideshow.

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China Succeeds in Offering Wisdom Course to College Students

2010-11-08T13:30:00Z

Drawing resources from its five thousand years of civilization, China has successfully offered a course on Wisdom stidues to college students and published the first wisdom study text book.

WISDOM: A COURSE BOOK FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS (Daxuesheng Zhihuixue in Chinese, publisher: Xiandai Jiaoyu Publishing House, Beijing, September 2009.ISBN: 978-7-80196-464-9) authored by brother scholars Qinglin Zhang (a Psychology professor ) and Qingsong Zhang a history Ph.D.) is a text book for a college course which aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of wisdom for college students. The course was designed with two purposes: let college students know the importance and benefits to put obtaining wisdom as their goal for college study and to teach students how to use wisdom to improve their learning so that they can have a higher goal for their college learning and in the meantime obtain new tools to handle their study and future life.

The course: Leaning Wisdom in College, was first offered to college students in China's Xi Nan Daxue (Southwest University) in Chongqing. About 400 students selected the course in the first offering. Doctor Qingsong Zhang (Ph.D. in History, University of Virginia, 1994) was the co-developer of this course and first lecturer. The course was very succeccful. A survey revealed that about 95% of the students believed that new college students should take this course first and then take other courses related to their major.

The course has been taught three years in Chongqing. Now the brothers are planning to introduce it to Beijing's top universities in China.

How To Measure The Wisdom of a Crowd

2010-10-20T18:34:00Z

by Jessica Marshall, Discovery News

The "intelligence" of a group can be measured, according to a new study, and it has little to do with the brain power of its individual members.

What makes a team more intelligent has more to do with the group's interactions. More equal participation and greater social sensitivity on the part of its members are the key factors in predicting a group's intelligence, according to the study, published online today by the journal Science.

The findings could eventually be useful in screening teams before choosing one to charge with an important task, the authors propose, or in testing strategies for improving groups' performance.

"It really calls into question our notion of what intelligence is," said study lead author Anita Williams Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn. "It's been thought about as something that resides in one person."

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You Know More Than You Know

2010-10-19T20:15:00Z

By Jonah Lehrer, Wired

October 12, 2010

There’s a fascinating new paper in Psychological Science by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis on the virtues of unconscious thought when it comes to predicting the outcome of soccer matches. It turns out that the conscious brain – that rational voice in your head deliberating over the alternatives – gets in the way of expertise. Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of explicit knowledge, this experiment suggests that successful experts don’t consciously access these facts. When they evaluate a situation, they don’t systematically compare all the available soccer teams or analyze the relevant players. They don’t rely on elaborate spreadsheets or athletic statistics or long lists of pros and cons. Instead, Dijksterhuis’ study suggests that the best experts naturally depend on their unconscious mind, on that subterranean warehouse of feelings, hunches and instincts.

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Do You Know When You're Wrong?

2010-09-21T19:56:00Z

by Katherine Harmon, Scientific American

Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability Is Not Black and White

When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new study. Introspection—or metacognition, self-awareness about one's thinking—is a high-level mental process. "Accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals," researchers behind the new findings explained in their study.

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Does Age Really Bring Wisdom?

2010-08-24T21:46:00Z

By Josh Tapper, Guelph Mercury News August 10, 2010 Although adults older than 65 face challenges to body and brain, the 70s and 80s also bring an abundance of social and emotional knowledge, qualities scientists are beginning to define as wisdom. As Carstensen and another social psychologist, Fredda Blanchard-Fields of the Georgia Institute of Technology, have shown, adults gain a toolbox of social and emotional instincts as they age. According to Blanchard-Fields, seniors acquire a feel, an enhanced sense of knowing right from wrong, and therefore a way to make sound life decisions.

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The Pleasures of Imagination

2010-07-22T21:48:00Z

by Paul Bloom

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex. Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real...

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Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

2010-07-20T16:16:00Z

from TED

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Watch the video.

Can a Brain Scan Predict Your Behavior Better Than You Can?

2010-07-01T21:18:00Z

By Andrew Moseman | Discover Magazine

"It would be an advertiser’s dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they’ve found a region which might predict whether viewers will act on what a commercial tells them.

For a study published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers asked 20 participants to listen to a series of “persuasive messages.” While the test subjects listened, researchers used an fMRI to record the activity in various regions in their brains. The study was small–but researchers say that, with these 20 participants, they could determine many of these listeners’ intentions by looking at a region associated with self-consciousness, called the medial prefrontal cortex.

The subjects listened to messages covering a range of subjects, but the team, lead by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, was really interested in a public service message about the importance of using sunscreen. Before the brain scans, researchers surveyed the participants about a variety of their behaviors, including their expected sunscreen use for the next week.

After the brain scans were complete, researchers asked about their intentions again and gave participants “goodie bags” that included sunscreen towelettes. But a surprise follow-up phone call a week later revealed that only about half of the participants had lotioned up as often as they said they would.

The researchers then went back to the scans to hunt for hints that might have predicted this “complex real world behavior,” and that’s when they teased out possible predictions in the medial prefrontal cortex. By examining the activity in that area when the listeners heard the sunscreen messages, the researchers say they could predict the real sunblock use of three-quarters of the subjects. Thus, they claim, the brain scans were better predictors of behavior than the subjects’ own projections.
"

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Brain Wars

2010-07-01T21:17:00Z

By Dave Munger | Seed Magazine

"Every morning around 9 or 10, I take a break from my work and do an online crossword puzzle. I’ve gotten pretty good at them: I can solve almost any puzzle without asking the computer for extra hints. I can even complete the extra-hard “Sunday Challenge” most of the time. But the question that has puzzled scientists for years is whether skills like crossword-solving transfer to other, seemingly unrelated tasks. Does my skill at crosswords make me a better writer, or help me remember what I need at the grocery store?

For decades, it seemed that the answer was, in nearly every case, “no.” In 1973, William Chase and Herbert Simon conducted a seminal study, which found that chess experts were better than novices at remembering the configuration of pieces on a chess board. But the effect disappeared if the pieces were arranged in a random configuration instead of a position from a real game.

Chess experts’ memory, it seemed, was better than non-experts’ for remembering chess games, but chess experts are no better than anyone else at recalling their neighbor’s name when they run into them at the post office."

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The Expanding Mind

2010-07-01T21:15:00Z

By Pete Estep | Seed Magazine

"Scarcely a decade has passed since scientists painstakingly sequenced the first bacterial genome, yet today automated human genome sequencing is becoming routine, heralding a new era of medicine. Replacement tissues and even organs can now be grown from a patient’s own cells and used without risk of immune rejection. Genetic therapies for a plethora of debilitating conditions are on the horizon; brain and body imaging technologies allow early discovery of potentially harmful pathologies. But as these developments have unfolded, another area of research has simultaneously matured to rival them in its dramatic potential to help people. It’s called neuroengineering.

My colleagues and I have expected these events for years, but we are still awed by the results; some things are so powerful that, even if you know they are coming, they remain breathtaking when they actually arrive. Watching a person move a robotic limb or control the functions of a computer, through thought alone, we have little choice but to stare in amazement. These breakthroughs were made possible by prototype brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which allow direct communication between the brain and external devices."

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Can People Become Experts without the Experience?

2010-07-01T21:13:00Z

By Charles Q. Choi

"The dozen students and scientists spread over an area called Furnace Creek looked like cyborgs in floppy hats scrabbling over the boulders. Before hammering chips off rocks, they inspected them with magnifying lenses held up next to eyeglasses sporting miniature cameras and infrared lights.

A seasoned geologist could tease out a history of earthshaking clashes here from evidence in the terrain—a break in a steep grey slope, for instance, suggested a fault at work fracturing the landscape. The aim now of the cameras was to see how researchers' eyes darted across this scene, to figure out how experienced minds unconsciously scan the world for clues that point the way to discoveries.

On this expedition out in Death Valley—where driest, hottest and lowest places on the continent are found — the scientists are investigating how geologists view landscapes, but such research could very well delve into how detectives analyze crime scenes or soldiers look for camouflaged targets or distinguish between friend and foe when storming rooms. Researchers then perhaps could train neophytes with virtual reality displays that simulate environments of interest."

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Animal Communication Helps Reveal Roots of Language

2010-07-01T21:12:00Z

ByMichael Balter

"Language leaves no traces in the archaeological record, and many researchers have been doubtful about how much animal communication could reveal about the unique features of human communication. That began to change in the 1990s, when linguists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, primatologists, and other scientists teamed up to test new hypotheses about how language arose. Since 1996, this interdisciplinary crowd has gathered every 2 years at Evolang, a meeting devoted to deciphering the evolutionary origins of language. Although some say the early Evolang gatherings suffered from too many hypotheses and too little testing, many think last month's meeting marks a turning point for the field. Participants flocked to hear a barrage of new data from animal and human studies. The new empiricism may help resolve one of the field's liveliest debates: whether the first human language consisted of gestures, similar to today's sign languages, or articulated speech. At the meeting, a new and unlikely seeming animal model for human language got star billing: songbirds. Their ability to learn and imitate their parents' melodious tunes has many parallels with the ability of human children to learn spoken language, researchers say."

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A Weird View of Human Nature Skews Psychologists' Studies

2010-06-25T19:12:00Z

By Dan Jones

"Suppose you're a psychologist at a research university, trying to figure out what drives human behavior. You have devised simple, clever experiments in which people play economic games or perceive visual illusions, and you would like large sample sizes. How will you find subjects? For generations of psychologists, the answer has been straight-forward: Use the pool of thousands of undergraduates at your university.

But although undergrads from wealthy nations are numerous and willing subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a drawback: They are WEIRDos. That is, they are people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. In a provocative review paper published online in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) last week, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and psychologists Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia in Canada argue that WEIRDos aren't representative of humans as a whole and that psychologists routinely use them to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behavior."

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The Pattern Behind Self-deception

2010-06-24T15:58:00Z

By Michael Shermer

"Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble."

Watch the video.

Image from TED presentation.

Questionable Answers

2010-06-24T14:51:00Z

By Dave Munger in SEED

"Women married to wealthier men say they experience more orgasms. People who say they watch more TV are more likely to die sooner. People who say they got more vaccines are more likely to say they got sick after getting them. People who say they eat more fish are more likely to say they are depressed.

All these statements are true, backed up by scientific research. But the studies that produced these surprising results all share the same weakness: They rely on self-reporting. Think of it this way: Just because you say you always have great sex doesn’t make it true."

Read the article.

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Why It's Hard To Learn New Things As We Get Older

2010-06-09T14:31:00Z

By Ricardo DeAratanha from The Los Angeles Times

"Why does our capacity to pick up skills like playing instruments or learning languages, to remember where we put our keys and a thousand other things, get poorer and poorer as we age? A study just published in the Journal of Neurscience suggests that one crucial reason is the loss of certain structures in brain cells called 'spines.'"

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A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel, Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind

2010-06-09T14:28:00Z

By Claudia Dreifus from The New York Times

"Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows."

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Agatha Christie and Nuns Tell a Tale of Alzheimer's

2010-06-02T20:22:00Z

By Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, npr.org

"If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails, blogs and Facebook pages – may reveal much more than whom you had a crush on in middle school or that embarrassing dream you had last week. It turns out that what we write, and how we write, may hold clues about our future selves..."

Read the article.

Many Faiths, One Truth

2010-06-01T17:17:00Z

By Tenzin Gyatso from The New York Times

"Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions."

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The Wisdom of Herds: How Social Mood Moves the World

2010-06-01T17:09:00Z

By John Casti from NewScientist

"Put simply, the mood of a group - an institution, state, continent or even the world - is how that group, as a group, feels about the future. Is the group optimistic or pessimistic? Clearly, this question must be addressed on the timescale appropriate for the type of event we care about. For instance, in a short-timescale prediction such as the sort of films people will like next year, it would be useless to look at the shifting mood of the population over decades. But decades would be exactly right for a phenomenon like globalisation."

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2010-05-27T19:10:00Z

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Carol Dweck's Attitude: It's Not About How Smart You Are

2010-05-27T18:14:00Z

By David Glenn from The Chronicle of Higher Education

"That's one tiny way in which Dweck's theories might change higher education. But she also has grander hopes. Colleges could improve their students' learning, she says, if they relentlessly encouraged them to think about their mental skills as malleable, rather than as properties fixed at birth. No more saying, "I can't major in chemistry because I'm just not wired for math."

Most of the evidence on this point comes from studies of younger students. Dweck herself spends a great deal of time these days acting as a consultant to public schools, especially middle schools. But she and others have also conducted several studies that suggest that college students, too, do better if they think of intelligence as flexible rather than frozen. In the next several years, Dweck hopes to develop a program that would train entering college students to adopt a "growth mindset," in regard to not only their intelligence but also their emotions."

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Picking Our Brains: Nine Neural Frontiers

2010-05-27T18:08:00Z

From NewScientist.

"The human brain is the most astoundingly complex structure in the known universe. Yet we are starting to unravel some of its mysteries, thanks to advances in brain imaging, genetics, stem cell research and more. We explore the latest findings from the hottest topics in neuroscience."

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Europe, Know Thyself: Social Science Solutions to the Biggest Problems

2010-05-05T17:56:00Z

by Roderick Floud in Times Higher Education

Demand is growing for the discipline's insights, but what does it need to meet it? Roderick Floud calls for tools to finish the job.

Social scientists have argued for years that they can help society understand itself and solve its problems. Now others seem to agree.

Politicians scrap about the meaning of statistics on schooling or crime. The European Commission asks social science to contribute to answering the grand challenges of our time: an eco-efficient society; global warming; security; ageing societies; public health; pandemics; and dwindling supplies of energy, food and water. Even physical scientists and engineers have been persuaded by the evidence of climate change that if human behaviour has caused the problem, then understanding and changing it needs to be part of the solution.

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Neurocriticism and Neurocapitalism

2010-05-05T17:53:00Z

By Rob Horning from PopMatters.

"On 1 April of this year, the New York Times ran an article by Patricia Cohen about “neuro lit crit”—neurologically informed literary criticism, which some English professors hope will be the savior of their departments. (“Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know”) Apparently this is an effort to cloak the study of literature with a technologically advanced methodology, so that English departments can justify their funding at American Research I universities. Lit crit is no longer recondite mental masturbation over a pile of old novels and some arcane French philosophers and word twisters. It’s science!"

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Free, Tolerant, and Happy

2010-05-05T17:50:00Z

by Richard Florida

"A week or so ago, Newsweek's Julia Baird pointed to my analysis of the connection between national happiness and tolerance. That reminded me and my MPI colleagues of the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index. The index, which covers 183 countries, is based on ratings for 10 specific factors: business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, government size, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption, and labor freedom. Hong Kong topped the list overall, followed by Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Switzerland. Canada came in 7th, the highest among North American nations and slightly ahead of the United States which ranked 8th..."

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New Study: Some Sciences Really Are Better Than Others

2010-05-05T17:50:00Z

By David Berreby from Big Think.

"If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are "harder," more fundamentally "sciencey" sciences than hers. "You can't use the standards of one science to judge another," she might say. "Physics is different from biology, not better." Not so, you answer: There must be standards common to all the sciences, which some meet better than others do. You're now set up for a seemingly unresolvable philosophical debate. Most working scientists I know would rather face the pointiest of sticks."

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What Is Your Place In The World?

2010-05-05T17:46:00Z

By Dr. Judith Rich from The Huffington Post.

"I just returned from the Wisdom 2.0 conference, held last weekend in Mountain View, CA at the Computer History Museum. Hoping to discover more about wisdom, I came away with a new understanding and appreciation for the amazing role technology is playing in helping humans know and understand each other better, even though we may never meet face to face."

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Review - Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions

2010-05-05T17:29:00Z

By Iddo Landau from Metapsychology.

" The field of what David Benatar aptly calls Analytic Existentialism, that is, the examination of themes traditionally discussed by existentialists with the tools of analytic philosophy, is of growing importance. Many more papers are published in this field every year. In this second edition of Life, Death and Meaning, David Benatar expands on the first edition with additional articles by Bruce Waller on optimism and pessimism, Christine Overall on whether immortality is indeed a benefit, and Benatar himself on suicide. The suggestions for further reading have also been enlarged."

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George Whitesides: Toward a Science of Simplicity

2010-05-05T15:57:00Z

By George Whitesides from TED

"Simplicity: We know it when we see it -- but what is it, exactly? In this funny, philosophical talk, George Whitesides chisels out an answer."

Watch the video.

Wisdom: An Endangered Natural Resource

2010-04-29T18:04:00Z

By Lama Surya Das from The Huffington Post.

"Wisdom is an endangered natural resource today in our Over-Information Age, where knowledge is rising and genuine sagacity increasingly rare. If we wish to become wiser and more sane, we'd do well exploit and develop our own innate natural resources for a change while furthering the sustainability of our planet and civilization. For example, time too is a natural resource; though we seem to live in a time-starved era, I personally believe that it's not time we lack but focus and prioritization. This is an inside job. The evergreen subject of how to live our lives is the very purview of wisdom and the necessary cultivation of self-knowledge and awareness. Perspicacious wisdom is the highest form of sanity."

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The Examined Life, Age 8

2010-04-29T18:01:00Z

By Abby Goodnough from The New York Times.

"A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks."

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Wisdom 2.0 Conference: Merging Wisdom and Technology

2010-04-29T17:57:00Z

By Soren Gordhamer from The Huffington Post.

"It is by most estimates an odd group to bring together ... the Vice President of Engineering at Twitter, the Vice President of Products at Google, along with a Zen teacher, and editors from the Huffington Post and the popular social media blog, Mashable.

The subject: the intersection of wisdom and technology. How do we live wisely in a modern or 2.0 world, and at the same time how do we engage and use all the great technologies of our day, from cell phones to social networks?"

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Nudges Gone Wrong

2010-04-26T15:43:00Z

By Ray Fisman from Slate.

"Psychologists and behavioral economists hope that our tendency to benchmark our own achievements using the performance of others might provide a way to encourage Americans to become better citizens. Can the fear of being below average persuade us to reduce our electricity consumption, increase our charitable contributions, and otherwise compete to be better citizens?"

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Magical Trees

2010-04-26T15:38:00Z

By Diana Beresford-Kroeger from Seed.

"Combine these two archetypes and you get an unusual hybrid organism, a self-described “renegade scientist.” Beresford-Kroeger, a native of Ireland, melds aboriginal healing, Western medicine, and botany in her lectures and writings about trees and sustainability. In books such as Arboretum America and A Garden for Life, she has advanced what she terms a “Bioplan”—reforesting cities and rural areas with trees of all types, according to their nutritional, medicinal, environmental, and spiritual properties. Though veering too far from what some would consider mainstream science, Beresford-Kroeger’s views are nonetheless drawing attention from scientists who are increasingly warming to holistic, systems-oriented approaches."

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How Our Brains Make Memories

2010-04-21T19:02:00Z

By Greg Miller

"Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate."

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Study: Brain Exercises Don't Improve Cognition

2010-04-21T18:53:00Z

By Eben Harrell

"You've probably heard it before: the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened. It's an assumption that has spawned a multimillion-dollar computer-game industry of electronic brainteasers and memory games. But in the largest study of these games to date, a team of British researchers has found that healthy adults who undertake computer-based "brain training" do not improve their mental fitness in any significant way."

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Scientists say free will probably doesn't exist, but urge: "Don't stop believing!"

2010-04-06T19:13:00Z

by Jesse Bering from Scientific American

"Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you have agreed, as a secret agent in some confidential military operation, to travel back in time to the year 1894. To your astonishment, it’s a success! And now—after wiping away the magical time-travelling dust from your eyes—you find yourself on the fringes of some Bavarian village, hidden in a camouflaging thicket of wilderness against the edge of town, the distant, disembodied voices of nineteenth-century Germans mingling atmospherically with the unmistakable sounds of church bells.

Quickly, you survey your surroundings: you seem to be directly behind a set of old row houses; white linens have been hung out to dry; a little stream tinkles behind you; windows have been opened to let in the warm springtime air. How quaint. No one else appears to be about, although occasionally you glimpse a pedestrian passing between the narrow gaps separating the houses. And then you notice him. There’s a quiet, solemn-looking little boy nearby, playing quietly with some toys in the dirt. He looks to be about six years old—a mere kindergartner, in the modern era. It’s then that you’re reminded of your mission: this is the town of Passau in Southern Germany. And that’s no ordinary little boy. It’s none other than young Adolph Hitler (image above).

What would you do next?

This scenario is, rather unfortunately for us, in the realm of science fiction. But your answer to this hypothetical question—and others like it—is a matter for psychological scientists, because among other things it betrays your underlying assumptions about whether Hitler, and the decisions he made later in his life, were simply the product of his environment acting on his genes or whether he could have acted differently by exerting his “free will.” Most scientists in this area aren’t terribly concerned over whether or not free will does or doesn’t exist, but rather how people’s everyday reasoning about free will, particularly in the moral domain, influences their social behaviors and attitudes. (In fact, the Templeton Foundation has just launched a massive funding initiative designed to support scientific research on the subject of free will.)..."

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The Sensed-Presence Effect

2010-04-06T19:04:00Z

by Michael Shermer in Scientific American

"In the 1922 poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically: Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.

In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”

Third man, angel, alien or deity—all are sensed presences, so I call this the sensed-presence effect. In his gripping book, The Third Man Factor (Penguin, 2009), John Geiger documents the effect in mountain climbers, solo sailors and ultraendurance athletes. He lists conditions associated with it: monotony, darkness, barren landscapes, isolation, cold, injury, dehydration, hunger, fatigue and fear. I would add sleep deprivation; I have repeatedly experienced its effects and witnessed it in others during the 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America. Four-time winner Jure Robic, a Slovenian soldier, recounted to the New York Times that during one race he engaged in combat a gaggle of mailboxes he was convinced were enemy troops; another year he found himself being chased by a “howling band” of black-bearded horsemen: “Mujahedeen, shooting at me. So I ride faster.”..."

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The Disparity Between Experiments that Suggest Sophisticated Cognition in Animals and Those that Find Hard Limits to Animal Intelligence Has Created A Debate Over Animal “Personhood”

2010-04-05T19:10:00Z

By Dave Munger from Seed.

"The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated, and how should that possibility influence decisions on the animal’s future treatment? Orcas, like their close relatives, dolphins, certainly seem smart, though researchers debate just how intelligent these cetaceans are and how similar their cognition is to humans. Should we ever treat such creatures like people?"

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New Insights into the Science of Emotion Unravel the Seeming Neurological Magic that Turns Emotions into Social Expressions

2010-04-05T19:00:00Z

By Genevieve Wanucha from Seed.

"Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain."

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Kierkegaard's World, Part 4: 'The essentially Human is Passion'

2010-04-05T18:56:00Z

By Clare Carlisle from Gaurdian.

"In order to answer these questions, we need to look back at the philosophical tradition that Kierkegaard inherited. The dominant view within this tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through to Descartes, Spinoza and Kant, is that reason is the most important aspect of the human being. Philosophers have frequently opposed our capacity for rational thought to "the passions", or the emotions, and many have argued that living a good human life involves controlling, subduing, or even eliminating one's emotions and appetites. According to this view, reason ought to rule over the passions."

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Review - Mental Actions

2010-04-05T18:50:00Z

By Ulla Schmi from Metapsychology.

"Lucy O'Brien's and Matthew Soteriou's Mental Actions accounts for a phenomenon that has been a stepchild to both Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Action: Mental Action. One anthology later, that much is clear: they better had done differently. Mental Actions touches on core topics not only in the ontology of action, but also in the ontology, epistemology and phenomenology of the mind as well as on questions in moral philosophy. Three issues predominate: Are mental actions to be understood analogously to bodily actions? How do we control and regulate them? How do we gain knowledge of our mental actions?"

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A World Without Why?

2010-04-05T18:47:00Z

By Raymond Geuss from The Point.

"I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable, partly because I don’t think, finally, that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations which would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual “philosophical” part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me—and quantitatively, in any case, so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored."

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Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

2010-03-29T17:37:00Z

From TED

"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness..."

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Why Do We Believe?

2010-03-12T22:46:00Z

by David Munger from Seed Magazine

"Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly, this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated the results of several earlier studies in showing that strong religious belief was correlated with lower intelligence. In this case, adolescents who scored higher on intelligence tests were less likely to be religious as adults.

But Rees says Kanazawa’s study goes beyond those earlier studies to arrive at a potential explanation of why less-intelligent people are more religious: Intelligence evolved in order for people to adapt to novel situations. Kanazawa’s analysis of two data sets found that intelligence is also correlated to political beliefs (liberals tend to be more intelligent), and some moral beliefs such as attitudes about promiscuity (smarter males believe promiscuity is bad). It’s not correlated to attitudes about things like children, family, and friends, that don’t change much over generations..."

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Think Twice: How the Gut's "Second Brain" Influences Mood and Well-Being

2010-02-26T17:30:00Z

by Adam Hadhazy from Scientific American

"As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our "second brain".

A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body..."

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How Fantasies Affect Focus

2010-02-26T17:27:00Z

by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American

"Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin..."

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The Seed Salon: Albert-László Barabási + James Fowler (video)

2010-02-25T22:42:00Z

"Barabási mathematically describes networks in the World Wide Web, the internet, the human body, and society at large. Fowler seeks to identify the social and biological links that define us as humans. In this video Salon, Barabási and Fowler discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the natural selection of robustness, and ask: Is society turning inward?"

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Wisdom of the Fool's Choice

2010-02-25T21:13:00Z

by Philip Ball from Nature News

"Medieval monarchies might not have had many things to recommend them compared with liberal democracies, but here's one: our rulers have no Fools. How often now will a national leader employ someone to laugh at their folly and remind them of bitter truths? More often, cabinets and advisers seem picked for their readiness to confirm their leader's judgements.

Some people fear that the information age encourages this tendency to spread to the rest of us. The Internet, they say, is a series of echo chambers: people join chat groups to hear others repeat their own opinions..."

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Many Minds, One Story

2010-02-12T19:17:00Z

By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine

"From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention and hones her technique in a lifelong experiment to portray consciousness and the character of thought. Her ideas about the unreliability of language were prescient given what science now knows: that the very structure of human brains allows language to introspect only a fraction of consciousness..."

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Giving the 'unconscious' a voice

2010-02-12T19:14:00Z

by Celeste Biever in New Scientist

"THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy..."

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Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally

2010-02-12T19:11:00Z

by Natalie Angier in The New York Times

"The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent..."

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Current TV’s Network Science

2010-02-12T19:07:00Z

by Evan Lerner in Seed Magazine

"When Max Lugavere and Jason Silva met at the University of Miami, they were two young idealists who found common ground in film, psychology, and philosophy. But when Al Gore announced his plans to start a TV network powered by a worldwide legion of socially minded young people and their video cameras, the dynamic duo found their calling. After getting the network’s attention with their own documentary work, they’ve been consistent faces of the channel since August 2005, appearing every weekday at midnight as hosts of Current TV’s Max and Jason: Still Up.

Max and Jason act as curators of the networks’ prodigious video documentaries and tour-guides through topics as diverse as travel, development, education, and fashion. But the two couldn’t leave their shared perspective on science and the human condition behind. Their mantra is to show how understanding and appreciating the natural world—and the modern technology that reshapes it—can cross geographical, cultural, and religious divides. And by combining their own profiles of research institutions and non-profits with vignettes form videographers across the globe, they’ve put their philosophy into action.

Seed editor Evan Lerner spoke with Max and Jason about their perspective on science communication and how the power of social networks is changing how individuals learn about the world around them..."

Read the interview.

Brain food: The Psychology of Heroism

2010-02-12T17:26:00Z

By Aditya Chakrabortty from The Guardian

"Of all the virtues, heroism is now the most remote. Heroes are either mythic or historical characters (Achilles or Gandhi) or they are superhuman (Spider-Man, or even 9/11 firefighters). What they are not is one of us. Our age has role models and it has celebrities, but it has no room for heroes.

Fighting to revive heroism is Philip Zimbardo, the septuagenarian who is probably the most famous living psychologist in the world. Zimbardo built his career on the study of evil; in 1971, he led the Stanford Prison Experiment, where long-haired students were put in a mock jail and divvied up as prisoners or guards at random. Within a few days, the "guards" were humiliating their "prisoners", refusing some permission to urinate and subjecting others to simulated sodomy.

That experiment and others convinced Zimbardo that ordinary people could be driven to evil acts if put in horrific situations. His latest work flips that principle and asks: how can normal folk be made to behave heroically?"

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The iBrain, The mobile communication device in your head.

2010-02-11T20:03:00Z

By William Saletan from Slate.

"Here's a real-life horror story: Five people have been found buried alive inside their bodies. Paralyzed by brain injuries, they lay inert for years, seemingly oblivious to the doctors and loved ones around them. Four were diagnosed as vegetative. Then a European research team scanned their brains. It turns out they're aware; they just can't speak or move. God knows how many more are trapped like this.

On the heels of this frightening idea comes another: The scans that exposed these patients' thoughts could expose yours. They could read your mind...

Relax. The brain scans are wonderful news. The patients were trapped anyway; the scans have simply restored their ability to communicate. Better yet, that communication remains voluntary. Without the patients' cooperation, the scans would have found nothing. That's the most marvelous thing the scans have discovered: Human minds stripped of every other power can still control one last organ—the brain."

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Science and the Inescapability of Metaphysics

2010-02-11T19:59:00Z

By Robert A. Delfino from The Global Spiral.

"The last three centuries have witnessed the great rise of the empirical sciences, such as physics and biology. Indeed, who can deny the extraordinary achievements of science? The technology that we rely on everyday and the life-saving medical procedures that were unavailable to previous times are all the fruit of scientific research. It is so easy to be proud of our scientific achievements that many have come to view science as the pinnacle of human knowledge. In fact, some philosophers and scientists hold that science is the only way to knowledge. This view is sometimes called scientism. Of course, not all philosophers and scientists embrace scientism, but enough do to make it an important issue, well-deserving of our attention."

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Examined Life (What is Popular Philosophy?)

2010-02-11T19:51:00Z

By Jonny Thakkar from The Point.

"Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version of Steven Pinker? Various names spring to mind—Simon Blackburn, A.C. Grayling and Alain de Botton among them¹—but despite impressive sales it seems fair to say that none has achieved the cultural significance of a Richard Dawkins or Steven Levitt. Moreover, their work has done little to appease critics who charge that in a time of “culture wars” philosophers have abandoned their posts, retreating to the crusty comforts of academic armchairs rather than facing up to the avarice and fundamentalism around them. Contemporary philosophy, these critics allege, has next to nothing to say about the nature of the contemporary world. The makers of Examined Life, a 2008 documentary, concur; they claim their film “pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.” This suggests that philosophy is supposed to be popular, but has somehow ended up the exclusive province of eggheads and boffins. But how can such an intricate, elusive, arduous discipline ever be popular?"

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Confucius say: I can change your life, How has a book of of ancient Chinese wisdom become a self-help guide, selling in millions?

2010-02-11T19:47:00Z

By Rob Sharp from The Independent.

"You sit cross-legged on a bamboo mat, soften your breathing and attempt to extract solace from the wisdom of one of the world's great philosophers. You read aloud from a recent translation of his work: "Learning from books as we grow from childhood to old age, from this you will learn the ability to hold on to happiness." Hang on a minute. Surely there's more to understanding life than that?

Yet since it was launched in China in 2007, the self-help book Confucius from the Heart has sold more than 10 million copies there. A simplification of the Analects of Confucius, a collection of the great mind's most famous writings, the sagacious tracts have been rendered digestible by Yu Dan, a 42-year-old professor at China's Beijing Normal University. The book began in 2006 as a series of lectures by Yu Dan, broadcast on Chinese Central Television, and rapturously received. Now the it's been translated and is available across the globe, and is about to be published here in paperback. So how has a book of 2,500-year-old philosophy, subtitled "Ancient Wisdom for Today's World", hooked in such a great number of modern readers (and in the process trounced its critics, who argue it is a perversion of an ancient wisdom)?"

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Keyboards, Codes and the Search for Optimality

2010-02-03T20:53:00Z

from American Scientist by Robert L. Dorit

In biology, as in technology, we should not confuse persistence with perfection

"A simplified, and ultimately misleading, account of the evolutionary process argues that natural selection inexorably leads to optimal adaptation. According to this perspective, organisms face challenges presented by the environment, and ultimately, through the agency of natural selection, find the best solutions. From this point of view, the living world—from the three-dimensional structure of enzymes to the drag-minimizing shape of porpoises—could thus be described as a compendium of these supposedly ideal adaptations..."

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons .

Conference on Individual and Organizational Renewal in Albuquerque NM March 19-24, 2010

2010-02-02T02:42:00Z

Founded on the Wisdom research of Elle Allison, Ph.D, Renewal Coaching is sponsoring a conference in Albuquerque NM on March 19-24 (come for two day increments of for all six days). The first two days (March 19-20) are for leaders at all levels who want to add coaching as an approach to their management style, and for professional coaches. The second two days (March 21-22) are for leaders who want to apply strategies for increasing individual and organizational renewal. Renewal is the antidote to organizational decline. Renewal creates sustainable change. The last two days (March 23-24) is for individuals who wish to become licensed Renewal Coaches. During this session, you will learn how to support others through the renewal coaching perspective (visit www.RenewalCoaching.com to inquire about licensing and to access other resources such as free webinars and the Renewal Coaching assessments). Elle is co-founder of Renewal Coaching, a global network of leaders at all levels and in all fields and licensed coaches who support other people to achieve their most important goals and create a greater good. For detailed agendas and a registration form, please visit www.RenewalCoaching.com or www.WisdomOut.com or call Elle directly at 505.235.0665.

Never Mind What People Believe—How Can We Change What They Do? A Chat with Robert Cialdini

2010-01-23T19:53:00Z

by David Roberts from Grist

"When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable. Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between what it would make sense for people to do and what they actually do. Efforts to change people’s behavior have a record that can charitably be described as mixed..."

Read the article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

You won't find consciousness in the brain

2010-01-21T21:01:00Z

by Ray Tallis from New Scientist

"Most neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences..."

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Some Social Skills May Be Genetic

2010-01-21T20:59:00Z

by Janelle Weaver for Wired Science

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who’s who.

The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language..."

Read the article.

Clive Thompson on How Group Think Rules What We Like

2010-01-21T20:56:00Z

by Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine

"Can you persuade someone to like a product by telling them that it’s popular? Do teenagers like Taylor Swift because she’s good or because everyone else they know likes her — so hey, she must be good, right?

Sociologist Robert Merton dubbed this tendency to base what we think we think on what other people are doing the “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1949, and since then social scientists have tried to measure how powerful it actually is. Now, based on some studies conducted with the help of the Internet, it seems clear that we’re often just sheep..."

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How to Forget Fear

2010-01-21T20:54:00Z

by Ed Yong and Alice Fishburn from Seed Magazine

"Imagine if you could rewrite your mind as quickly as a document on your computer. No more painful memories, no phobias or ingrained fears, just a blank slate where the scars that mark each human life used to be. This may sound like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy but last month it came a step closer to reality at New York University. By manipulating memory a research team managed to remove a conditioned fear response among volunteers. As scientists learn more about the mechanics of the mind, such targeting and erasing of traumatic recollections will become easier and easier..."

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Spotlight on Science Diplomacy

2010-01-21T20:49:00Z

by Lorna Casselton and James Wilsdon for Seed Magazine

"Last week, top scientists from more than 100 countries gathered in London for one of the biggest scientific meetings of the year: the InterAcademy Panel. Hosted by the Royal Society as part of its 350th anniversary celebrations, the Panel brings together the world’s science academies to identify how science can help tackle urgent global problems. At the top of the agenda in 2010—the International Year of Biodiversity—is how to stem the crisis of global biodiversity loss.

But biodiversity is only one of many policy priorities where scientists have a role to play, some of which go beyond the traditional preconceptions of scientists’ job descriptions. In a speech on Tuesday, David Miliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, called for a much stronger role for science in foreign policy. At first glance, scientists and diplomats don’t make obvious bedfellows..."

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Brain of world's best-known amnesiac mapped

2010-01-15T22:50:00Z

by Elizabeth Landau for CNN

"Henry Molaison, known as H.M. in scientific literature, was perhaps the most famous patient in all of brain science in the 20th century.

"My daddy's family came from the South and moved North, they came from Thibodaux Louisiana, and moved north," Molaison would say. "My mother's family came from the North and moved South." Within 15 minutes he might repeat this exact statement twice more, unable to remember that he'd already said it. Scientists studied him for most of his adult life.

This week, researchers are dissecting his brain to figure out exactly which structures contributed to his amnesia, which he suffered for more than 50 years..."

Read the article from cnn.com.

Watch video of the brain surgery.

Are Scientists or Moviemakers the Bigger Dodos?

2010-01-15T22:40:00Z

by Abby Callard for Smithsonian

"You were a tenured professor at the University of New Hampshire and you left to pursue filmmaking in Hollywood. Why?

Storytelling. As I look back on the past 30 years, I realize that the single biggest thing that drew me into science were great scientists who told great stories that caught my attention and enraptured me. I went off and did science for a long time and thoroughly enjoyed it, and then I really enjoyed eventually telling my own stories. I got so wrapped up in that that I got sidelined into a whole, separate aspect of that which is telling the stories for their own sake. That’s what drew me into filmmaking in the early ’90s. The deeper I got into that, the more serious I became and finally decided to go to film school in the mid ’90s. That’s when I changed careers..."

Read the interview.

Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health therapy

2010-01-15T22:38:00Z

by Eric Jaffe for the Los Angeles Times

"If your doctor advised a treatment that involved leeches and bloodletting, you might take a second glance at that diploma on the wall. For the same reason, you should think twice about whom you see as a therapist, says a team of psychological researchers.

In a November report that's attracting controversy the way couches attract loose change, three professors charge that many mental health practitioners are using antiquated, unproved methods and that many clinical psychology training programs lack scientific rigor..."

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Faith, hope and clarity

2010-01-14T19:45:00Z

By Sholto Byrnes from NewStatesman.

"The rate of HIV infection in Kenya is one of the highest in the world, but safer sex is at last being adopted – and it is religious groups that are leading the way, in a new spirit of openness and acceptance.

An example of this is how the Channels of Hope-trained leaders deal with extramarital sex; it is, after all, frowned upon by nearly all faiths. Do you, I ask Hawa, say that it is khalwa ("impermissible seclusion" between a man and a woman), but if you must do it, use a condom? "Yes, like that," she replies. Sheikh Idris leans in. "It says in the Quran that if you suspect something will harm you, don't do it," he says. "But if you have to, then do it with wisdom." "

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Elder Wisdom

2010-01-13T16:30:00Z

by Caroline Bassett, The Wisdom Institute

"Recently, on a trip East from my home in Minnesota, my sister and I visited a 101-year-old friend of the family, an exemplar of elder wisdom, who lives in rural Massachusetts. Aunt Jane, as we called her (not her real name and some details have been changed to protect her privacy, but she really is 101 years old) ruefully acknowledged that she has to use a walker now and a hearing aid that she hates. She lives alone, drives, uses e-mail, and when we saw her, she was writing an article for the local newspaper. My sister Katherine and I asked a lot of questions — pumped Aunt Jane — about family friends from the old days of 30, 40, and even 50 years ago — and about herself. As I told her, when you’re a kid, the grown-ups are just there, like a kitchen table, with no intrinsic interest of their own. It’s only when you are older yourself that you see the growns as individuals and become curious about them.

Aunt Jane has an astonishing memory, remembering the facts of what happened and keeping the thread of the story strong and clear, avoiding side-tracking herself with other tidbits of interest. She remembered that the son of friends had been exempt from the service in World War II because he did spectroscopic analyses of cargo. And she remembered the names of the three wives of this man’s brother, the last of whom was a “long-faced doleful lady and the love of his life.”

What makes her so remarkable a specimen? It was not only that she has her health, that she never complained or even mentioned her aches and pains and resentments, that she lacked self-pity, that she talked frankly, openly, and uncritically about the people we asked after. It was that she was demonstrating what wisdom looks like..."

Read the article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Rise of the Wealth Whisperers

2010-01-12T14:53:00Z

by Robert Frank, Wall Street Journal

"Until now, little has been known about the field of wealth counseling. It is highly fragmented, informal and, by nature, discreet. (Lawyers used to do much of this work, until billable hours and caseload became sacrosanct.)

Yet a new study by Wise Counsel Research, a Massachusetts nonprofit group devoted to researching wisdom and wealth, sheds light on what is fast becoming a cottage industry of wealth management..."

Read the article.

The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion

2010-01-12T14:47:00Z

by John Tierney, NYT

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs?

In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts.

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity..."

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Mind Reading

2010-01-12T14:42:00Z

by Alison Gopnik, New York Times Book Review

"At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.

Stanislas Dehaene, a distinguished French cognitive scientist, has helped unravel that mystery. His gifts, on display in “Reading in the Brain,” include an aptitude for complex experiments and an appetite for detail. This makes for excellent science but not, paradoxically, easy reading. Still, his book will repay careful study, even if it doesn’t inspire blissful absorption..."

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Inside the Mind of a Savant

2010-01-12T14:36:00Z

By Darold A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen

Kim Peek possesses one of the most extraordinary memories ever recorded. Until we can explain his abilities, we cannot pretend to understand human cognition

"When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.”

He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet. He read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and 25 minutes. Four months later, when asked, he gave the name of the Russian radio operator in the book, referring to the page describing the character and quoting several passages verbatim. Kim began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far. He reads a page in eight to 10 seconds and places the memorized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now on his mental “hard drive..."

Read the article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Lost Wisdom of the Three Wise Men

2010-01-12T14:32:00Z

by Umberto Eco in The New York Times

"Almost by chance I recently happened to witness two similar scenes: a 15-year-old girl who was engrossed in a book of art reproductions, and two 15-year-old boys who were enthralled to be visiting the Louvre.

The parents of all three were nonbelievers and the teens were raised in secular countries; that lack of religious background clearly affected their ability to appreciate the art they were viewing..."

Read the article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Blame It on the Brain

2010-01-11T21:39:00Z

by John Lehrer in The Wall Street Journal

"Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.

Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year. Human routines are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88% of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. Bad habits are hard to break—and they're impossible to break if we try to break them all at once..."

Read the article.

Review - Explaining the Brain Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience by Carl F. Craver

2010-01-08T16:29:00Z

by Maura Pilotti in Metapsychology Online Reviews

"For Carl F. Craver, the philosophy of neuroscience has a labor-intensive and challenging objective to realize and a fundamental truth to reveal. Its objective is to make explicit the 'widely accepted though largely implicit standards' upon which scientists rely to assess the adequacy of explanations of brain phenomena. The undeniable fact to uncover, Craver claims, is that at present 'explanations in neuroscience describe mechanisms'. In Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience, the author takes the goal of divulging the standards of neuroscience seriously, methodically dissecting a variety of interpretations of brain phenomena to highlight their underlying similarities and differences and their strengths and weaknesses. Craver also cleverly concentrates on a few key illustrations of mechanistic explanations in neuroscience and then literally disassembles them to expose the norms that define their foundations..."

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Data deluge will reboot our brains

2010-01-08T16:26:00Z

by Richard Woods and Chris Hastings from Times Online

"The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day. That is the verbiage bombarding the average person in the 12 hours they are typically awake and “consuming” information, according to a new study.

Through emails, texting, internet surfing, reading and other media, our brains are being deluged with increasing quantities of information. Although we may not actively read 100,000 words a day, that is the approximate number reaching our eyes and ears. Add images, such as videos and computer games, and we are faced with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information each day — enough to overload the typical laptop inside a week..."

Read the article.

Am I my twin brother's keeper?

2010-01-08T16:23:00Z

by Christoffer van Tulleken from Times Online

"I have a clone, something not only genetically identical to me but that has shared most of my experiences, up to the end of our time together at medical school. Having a clone can be a blessing and a curse. It can sire children on my behalf, but it may pick an unsuitable mother. It is an organ bank for me, but equally it may demand a kidney from me at any moment. I bathe in the reflected light of its successes but wallow in the gloom of its failures.

So do I have two identities, or half an identity? I feel like I am only able to partly represent myself without my clone, which is a problem as I keep it in another country to avoid confusion. Since we are indistinguishable, perhaps only together do we constitute an entire person..."

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Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts

2010-01-08T16:20:00Z

by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld from Scientific American

"In 1984 Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to the gas chamber—an outcome that rested largely on the testimony of five eyewitnesses. After Bloodsworth served nine years in prison, DNA testing proved him to be innocent. Such devastating mistakes by eyewitnesses are not rare, according to a report by the Innocence Project, an organization affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University that uses DNA testing to exonerate those wrongfully convicted of crimes. Since the 1990s, when DNA testing was first introduced, Innocence Project researchers have reported that 73 percent of the 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. One third of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses. How could so many eyewitnesses be wrong?"

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In the Swiss Army knife of the brain, the ability to recognize faces may be a specialized tool

2010-01-08T16:18:00Z

by Carina Storrs in Scientific American

"Some people seem to have it all, mentally speaking—strong math and verbal skills, a keen memory and good spatial sense. This gift could be chalked up to good "generalist genes," or genes that affect many cognitive abilities and, broadly speaking, determine intelligence. The downside of generalist genes is that, because their functions overlap, someone who falters at understanding algebra may also be more likely to have trouble learning a foreign language..."

Read the article.

Intelligence and the Idle Mind

2010-01-08T16:12:00Z

by Jonah Lehrer in The Frontal Cortex

"I've written before about the importance of daydreaming and the so-called default, or resting state network, which seems to underlie some important features of human cognition.Instead of being shackled to our immediate surroundings and sensations, the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings and interesting counterfactuals. As a result, we're able to envision things that don't actually exist..."

Read the article.

Food Fighter

2010-01-08T16:06:00Z

by Nick Paumgarten

"Like many who have come before, [John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods] says that it was only when he started a business--when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape--that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension..."

Read the article.

Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain

2010-01-08T16:02:00Z

by Benedict Carey for The New York Times

"Scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock.

Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do.

And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years..."

Read the article.

Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them

2010-01-08T15:57:00Z

by Benedict Carey from The New York Times

"For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts..."

Read the article.

The Play's the Thing

2010-01-06T16:20:00Z

review by Michael Bérubé from American Scientist

"Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary” explanation of Why Society Is the Way It Is; we suspect them, with good reason, of trying to justify some outrageous social injustice on the grounds that it’s only natural. Likewise, there are legions of us who clap our hands over our ears when we hear the term evolutionary psychology. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the follies of sociobiology, and we’ve suffered through lectures claiming that our species is hardwired for middle-aged guys dumping their wives for young secretaries and students (I sat through that lecture myself) or that men run the world because women have wide hips for childbearing, whereas men can rotate three-dimensional shapes in their heads (okay, that one is a mash-up of two different lectures).

Brian Boyd is here to change all that. On the Origin of Stories attempts an evolutionary explanation of the appearance of art—and, more specifically, of the utility of fiction. From its title (with its obvious echo of Darwin) to its readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, Boyd’s book argues that the evolution of the brain (itself a development of some significance to the world) has slowly and fitfully managed to produce a species of primate whose members habitually try to entertain and edify one another by making stuff up..."

Read the article.

New Report: From Wealth Counselors to Wise Counselors

2009-12-11T18:41:00Z

Wise Counsel Research, Inc., a Massachusetts public charity run by wisdom grantee Keith Whitaker, has released a new report on the role of wisdom in wealth advising. He and his colleagues have collected the data for this report through structured interviews with advisors and families.

The mission of the Wise Counsel Research, Inc. is to discover and share knowledge about the role of wisdom in contemporary life, particularly on the subject of wealth.

To read their new report: "From Wealth Counselors to Wise Counselors: A Dialogue with Leeading Advisors to Wealthy Families" follow this link.

Untangling the Hard Problem of Consciousness

2009-12-03T20:14:00Z

by Todd Duncan at The Global Spiral

"A feeling of alienation is a common reaction to modern scientific descriptions of the cosmos. As journalist Bryan Appleyard (1992) expresses it, “On the maps provided by science, we find everything except ourselves.” At the core of this reaction is the discrepancy between the inner world of our awareness and the outer world of our objective scientific description of reality. This disconnect between two dominant aspects of our experience is a significant hurdle on the path toward what Weislogel (2007) calls a “whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person.” Thus a key step along the path toward wholeness is to find a comfortable home for our inner world of subjective experience within the framework of a scientific map of physical reality.

This challenge is often referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness: How can it be that subjective experience arises from physical processes in the brain? (The topic has a long history, but see, e.g., Chalmers 1995, 2002a, b.) Why is it that certain physical brain states are accompanied by the experience that there is “something it is like” to be in those states? (Nagel, 1974) After all, subjective experience seems extraneous to the physical description, and most physical states (rocks, ice, pencils, cell phones, etc.) are apparently not accompanied by such experiences.

My aim here is to describe a way to untangle the difficulty by clarifying the origin of the problem..."

Read the article.

The Dangerous Mysteries of Consciousness

2009-12-03T20:04:00Z

by Ron Rosenbaum from Slate

"There's a certain kind of mystery—unsolved and probably insoluble—that has a seductive attraction for me. I think the insolubility is the attraction. Historical and literary mysteries: What was the origin of Hitler's hatred? Did Shakespeare revise Hamlet? And I'm particularly troubled by metaphysical mysteries, the essential but oh-so-slippery mysteries of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the origin and nature of consciousness? What distinguishes living from nonliving being?..."

Read the article.

Waking the dead

2009-12-03T20:00:00Z

by Terry Eagleton from New Statesman

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future.

"The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist..."

Read the article.

Loneliness May Be Contagious

2009-12-01T23:57:00Z

By Lisa Grossman in Wired

"Staying socially connected may be just as important for public health as washing your hands and covering your cough. A new study suggests that feelings of loneliness can spread through social networks like the common cold..."

Read the article.

Buckle Up Your Seatbelt and Behave

2009-12-01T23:54:00Z

by William Ecenbarger in Smithsonian

"In the middle of the last century, Volvo began seeking improvements to seat belts to protect drivers and passengers in its vehicles. When the Swedish automaker tried a single strap over the belly, the result was abdominal injuries in high-speed crashes. The engineers also experimented with a diagonal chest restraint. It decapitated crash-test dummies.

Volvo then turned to a 38-year-old mechanical engineer named Nils Bohlin, who had developed pilot ejector seats for the Saab aircraft company. Bohlin knew it would not be easy to transfer aerospace technology to the automobile. "The pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash," he told an interviewer shortly before he died, in 2002, "but regular people in cars don't want to be uncomfortable even for a minute."

Read the article.

Perfect Strangers

2009-12-01T23:44:00Z

by Greg Laden in Seed

"In the movie “Face/Off” when John Travolta and Nicolas Cage stared at each other following face-switching surgery, we were meant to understand that both men had a very uncanny feeling. Seeing a copy of oneself that isn’t quite oneself elicits an emotional response robotics experts call the “uncanny valley,” a phenomenon psychologists have been trying to explain in human terms for decades, beginning with Freud himself. Seed’s Joe Kloc explores the history and science of this strange phenomenon in “Into the Uncanny Valley...”

Read the article.

Watch: Noam Chomsky + Robert Trivers

2009-12-01T23:41:00Z

Video production by Jacob Klein on Seed

"In the 1970s, a Harvard class taught by Robert Trivers ignited a controversy that would escalate into the "sociobiology wars." Across town at MIT, Noam Chomsky had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the Vietnam war. Throughout those pivotal years, and in the following decades, the two explored similar ideas, although from different perspectives. Long aware of each other's work, they had never met until a couple of months ago, when they sat down to compare notes on some common interests: deceit and self-deception...

See the video.

Why do we hate? Academics seek answer in new field

2009-12-01T23:38:00Z

In Psychology in the News

"Why did the *** hate the Jews? Why did the Hutus hate the Tutsis?

Hate is everywhere, but the fundamental question of why one person can hate another has never been adequately studied, contends Jim Mohr of Gonzaga University, who is developing a new academic field of hate studies.

The goal is to explain a condition that has plagued humanity since one caveman looked askance at another."

Read the article.

Can Your Expectations Shape My Behavior?

2009-12-01T23:29:00Z

by Bella DePaulo in Psychology Today

"So suppose I meet someone for the first time, let's say a man, who believes that single people are miserable and lonely and want nothing more than to become unsingle. He has no particular animus toward me or toward single people in general - he just expects single people to have certain emotions and motivations. Those are his beliefs. Would he behave toward me any differently than if he did not have those beliefs? Specifically, might he somehow get me to behave in ways that are in keeping with his false expectations about what I'm really like?

With regard to this specific question about whether expectations about single people can shape singles' behavior in ways that confirm those expectations - well, there is no research that tests exactly that. There are, however, hundreds - if not thousands - of studies of the ways that one person's expectations can shape another person's behavior. This isn't dopey Law of Attraction stuff - the studies show just how the process unfolds, and it is not by "manifesting" or other voodoo..."

Read the article.

Turning Up Your Creativity

2009-12-01T23:27:00Z

by Stephen Mason in Psychology Today

"Why is it that, except for Thomas Edison, it's mostly the young who invent new things?

Interestingly enough, Thomas Edison was far more of an innovator than an inventor and this was especially true in his later years. Those who have visited his laboratory museums in NJ and FL know that he was surrounded by teams of creative thinkers. His very special talent lay in bringing new products to market. And this is no small talent. The historical record is littered with the names of those who had lots of original ideas but no concept of just how to turn them into cash; Nikola Tesla, who was a contemporary of Edison, is a perfect example..."

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Does Modernization Affect Children's Cognitive Development?

2009-12-01T23:02:00Z

Science Daily

"Societal and technological changes have taken place at a dizzying pace over recent decades. A new cross-cultural study aimed to determine whether these dramatic changes have had an effect on the thinking skills that are learned over the course of childhood..."

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Signatures of Consciousness: A Talk by Stanislas Dehaene

2009-11-25T22:08:00Z

by John Brockman from Edge

"On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene's past twelve years of brain-imaging research is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders in patients.

'For the past twelve years', says Dehaene, 'my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound)...' "

See the video and read the article.

The Subconscious and Strategic Resource Recruitment

2009-11-25T21:53:00Z

by Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today

"Research involving subliminal priming tends to instantly grab people's attention, I guess, because there is simply something very enticing, but simultaneously disturbing about the idea that the subconscious might have significant power over our conscience. We don't like to think that we are not fully in control of our own decisions, but we do like the thought that there is some additional hidden computing power behind the choices we make.

That information does not need to become conscious to affect our behavior is experimentally substantiated and popularly accepted. For example, a recent study involved the amount of effort people put into a task depending on the size of a reward they might win for completing the task. The study's results show that people give greater effort if the potential reward is larger, even if the size of the award is only presented subliminally; something we might expect.
An interesting question that arises with these studies, is whether the subconsciously held information is employed simply as an indiscriminate motivation trigger, or whether there is some strategic application involved in how the subliminal information is used. In a way, the question is how smartly we are able to apply subconsciously held information to a situation..."

Read the article.

Read the study referred to in the article.

Deciding How to Decide

2009-11-25T21:51:00Z

by Greg Boustead in Seed

"It all started with Cheerios. Jonah Lehrer was once again standing in a supermarket aisle, crippled by the thought of which variety of whole-oat goodness to buy: honey nut or apple cinnamon. “It was an embarrassing waste of time,” he says, “and yet it happened to me all the time.” Lehrer decided that he had to figure out what was going on inside his brain when he contemplated such issues. And his curiosity transcended breakfast. How did the brain process picking a house? Choosing stocks? Split-second, life-or-death decisions? These questions led the author on a path from the epistemological roots of rational versus emotionally driven thinking to leveraging the tools of modern-day neuroscience to look inside the brain and see how it actually thinks. The result is his second book, How We Decide, a real-world exploration of the brain’s capacity for decision making. With it, Lehrer shows how different decisions require different mental tools; that rational thought isn’t always the answer; and that understanding how our brain processes information can improve the thousands of choices, big and small, we make every day..."

Read the article.

Ability to Guess Others' Thoughts Tied to Language Proficiency

2009-11-25T21:46:00Z

by Nicole Branan in Scientific American

"What’s this guy thinking? Does he know what I know? Most of us develop the ability to make inferences about what other people might be thinking, the hallmark of “theory of mind,” at age four. Scientists have long known that the acquisition of language plays a role in this process, but so far it had been unclear whether social experience could substitute for it. A new study suggests it cannot..."

Read the article.

Call for Papers: Wisdom

2009-11-18T18:55:00Z

Conference on the Cardinal Virtues
Viterbo University
La Crosse, Wisconsin
April 15-17, 2010

2010 Theme:
Wisdom
The 2010 conference is the culmination of a series of four conferences on the cardinal
virtues. We invite papers examining the meaning, history, and practical implications of
the idea of wisdom as a virtue. Submissions from a variety of disciplinary
perspectives are encouraged.

Presentations may include the following topics:
Cultural Understandings of Wisdom
Historical Understandings of Wisdom
Political Wisdom
Wisdom in Relation to the Virtues
Ignorance
Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception
Rationality and Irrationality

Keynote Speaker

David James Duncan
Author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K and several works of nonfiction, including God
Laughs & Plays and My Story as Told by Water.

Presentation proposals should be no more than one-page in length and include name, affiliation, address,
and e-mail address. Presentations will be limited to twenty minutes with ample time provided for
discussion. Proposals for panel discussions and “works in progress” are encouraged.
Deadline for submissions is January 11, 2010.

Proposals should be mailed to Dr. Richard Kyte, D. B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership,
Viterbo University, 900 Viterbo Drive, La Crosse, WI 54601.

For more information call (608) 796-3704 or email ethics@viterbo.edu.

Sponsored by the D. B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership

Link to the conference.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Cigarette Smoking is Caused by a Delusion

2009-11-13T16:51:00Z

from Psychology Today by Alex Lickerman

"I leaned back in my chair and breathed a heavy sigh. My patient, Mr. Rodriguez (not his real name), noticed my discomfort. "I know I should quit," he told me with a guilty shrug of his shoulders. "Have you ever tried?" I asked. "Once," he replied, "but it didn't stick." Mr. Rodriguez had been a pack-a-day smoker for the past 20 years, something he'd only begrudgingly confessed in response to a standard inquiry I make of all my first time patients. He didn't see it as a problem himself. Or at least he hadn't mentioned it when I'd asked him at the beginning of the visit why he'd come to see me. "Are you aware of all the ways cigarette smoking is bad for you?" I asked. An alarmingly high proportion of patients know surprisingly little about all the potential consequences of tobacco smoking. Mr. Rodriguez, however, was able to come up with two of the major ones: heart attacks and lung cancer. "Why do you keep smoking when you know it causes heart attacks and lung cancer?" I asked him. He shrugged, obviously embarrassed to be caught in a contradiction. But even as I tried to shame him into wanting to quit by preying on his need to appear consistent, I knew no contradiction actually existed. I knew this not because of my medical training or subsequent years of medical practice, but rather because of my many years of practice as a Buddhist.

THE KEY INGREDIENT TO HAPPINESS

The kind of Buddhism I practice isn't Zen or Tibetan, the two most popular forms in the United States, but rather Nichiren Buddhism, named after its founder, Nichiren Daishonin. The practice of Nichiren Buddhism doesn't involve meditation as do the other more popular forms but rather something even more foreign and discomforting to those of us raised in the traditions of the West---chanting. Every morning and every night I chant the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with a focused determination to challenge my negativity in an effort to give birth to wisdom..."

Read the article.

A Healthy Substitute for Willpower

2009-11-13T16:45:00Z

from Psychology Today by J.D. Trout

"I have always loved bourbon, and as a graduate student, I loved it regularly. Back then, I drank with friends routinely. But most of us also value a life free from nagging temptation. What to do?

If you change the person's environment, you can break the connection between a potent cue, and an entrenched response. Change the environment in the right way, and you can break the bond between the bar and the bourbon, the corral and cussing, the oven and overeating.

It certainly worked on college students. A study by Wendy Wood and her colleagues looked at the habitual behaviors of transfer students as they moved to a new university. Their habits of exercising, reading the paper, and watching TV-even when strong-did not survive the transfer when the move destabilized or disrupted the living circumstances that supported their habits. The disruption in their behavioral surroundings apparently blocked automatic cues, which then required intention to carry the action through..."

Read the article.

Artificial Sweeteners: Outwitting the Wisdom of the Body?

2009-11-11T18:53:00Z

by Linda Bartoshuk

"Obesity, with its correlations to heart disease, diabetes and a multitude of other health problems, is one of our largest public health concerns. It also has a very large behavioral basis. As psychologists, how can we contribute to getting people to eat healthier and exercise more? Behavioral researchers are working on many aspects of this problem, but as a researcher in taste, I gravitate towards understanding why people make the food choices they do. For decades, one choice available to dieters has been to substitute artificial sweeteners for sugar in their diet. But, do artificial sweeteners promote weight loss or weight gain? Although substituting sweeteners for sugar should lead to weight loss, the reality appears to be different. Two psychologists at Purdue have developed an animal model that supports the conclusion that artificial sweeteners lead to weight gain and shows us how it might happen..."

Read the article from APS Observer.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Scholars begin to dig deeper into defining wisdom to build new research field

2009-11-04T19:22:00Z

from the University of Chicago News Office

October 8, 2009

"Scholars from across the country are engaged this fall in a lively web-based conversation about the many aspects of wisdom, the subject at the heart of the University of Chicago Arete Initiative’s Defining Wisdom Project.

The project is a continuing effort to better understand the role of wisdom in human understanding. In addition to the website exchanges between researchers, scholars from diverse fields have presented their own research at conferences supported by the project. Conference participants recently looked at how an expanded understanding of wisdom could deepen decision-making models that focus primarily on human reason..."

Read the article.

Watch the video, featuring Howard Nusbaum, John Cacioppo, and several wisdom grantees.

Photo by Jasmine Kwong.

Brain Damaged But Self-Aware

2009-11-03T22:02:00Z

By Greg Miller from Science

"I think, therefore I am," pronounced the famed French philosopher René Descartes. What imbues us with this uniquely human sense of self-awareness? Some neuroscientists have pegged an area of the brain known as the insula, which helps us detect what's going on within our bodies. But an unusual case of a man with extensive damage to this region suggests that the insula cannot be the sole source of self-awareness..."

Read the full article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Hooked on Snap

2009-11-02T21:31:00Z

Knowing you're right is a high; even when you're wrong.

by Lynn Phillips from her Psychology Today blog Dream On

"My mother the corporate lawyer, when I told her I was about to marry a guy whose parents were Catholic, asked, alarmed: "Do they believe in Darwin?" And she wasn't aware that the question was, um, funny.

The Origin of Species was to Mother what The Holy Bible is to so many: she never read the whole thing, but accepted every word of it as true, while looking askance at doubters. ("Looking askance" here means "thoroughly despising.") So I understand why many creationists falsely view evolution as a rival version of fundamentalism: at the lay level it often is.

But even professional stewards of the scientific method share a particular vice with creationists: a secret addiction to certainty. Like crack, certainty is something our minds are designed to enjoy and ill-equipped to resist, even when it leads us down dark paths. Scientific fundamentalism -- certainty addiction at its most paradoxical -- claims that all science is based on solid proofs, on hard facts, or at least on the best available knowledge of the moment. But science itself tells us that this isn't exactly or always true, and is, in the un-fuzzy language of formal logic, "false"..."

Read the article.

Behavioral Ecology: Sex and Social Structure

2009-11-02T21:26:00Z

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Behavioral ecologists are discovering that social roles in beesmay recapitulate the reproductive life cycle of solitary females.

Highly social insects are an efficiency expert's dream come true. Without the benefit of instruction manuals and worker training classes, honey bee queens focus on laying eggs, leaving the details of brood care to an army of workers. One group of workers tends the nest, another forages for food, and neither pays much mind to reproducing. Ants and termites have similar divisions of labor...

Read the full article from Science.

Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?

2009-11-02T21:17:00Z

The John Templeton Foundation organizes a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions." The current question under consideration is: Does evolution explain human nature?

Follow this link to view:

A video from the Templeton/Discover panel discussion at
Yale University
Bloggingheads.tv “diavlog” between Frans de Waal and Jeffrey Schloss
Bloggingheads.tv “diavlog” between Robert Wright and Joan Roughgarden
"Darwin 200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain"
with New York Times columnist David Brooks

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Altruism vs. Selfishness

2009-11-02T21:15:00Z

by David Sloan Wilson

The idea that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is starting to stink. Can we please bury it now?

The conflict between altruism and selfishness, good and evil, is an eternal theme in religion and literature. It also threatens to be an eternal controversy in evolutionary theory. Eric Michael Johnson’s review of Frans de Waal’s latest book emphasizes empathy and cooperation’s role in evolution, so as one of the original proponents of group selection theory, I’d like to use it in making some general points on where this debate currently stands...

Read the full article from SEED.

Itineraries Issue on Wisdom

2009-10-09T20:12:00Z

The fall, 2009 issue of Itineraries is titled "The Harvest of Wisdom" and focuses on elder wisdom.

Table of Contents

Caroline Bassett
Elder Wisdom

Drew Leder
The Tao of Longevity

Margaret Owen Thorpe
Bird Wisdom

Robert C. Atchley
Serving from Spirit

Jane F. Gilgun
The Yellow Brick Road of Not Knowing

Read all of the articles here.

Image by Gertrud.

Why You Can’t Help Believing Everything You Read

2009-10-09T20:01:00Z

Psyblog recently made a post about cognition and belief which could have interesting implications for the study of wisdom.

"What is the mind's default position: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible? As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions? Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who was the critical scientist, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally? ..."

Read the rest of the post here.

Justice, Wisdom and the Law School Curriculum

2009-10-09T19:21:00Z

On the Legal Profession Blog, Jeff Lipshaw discusses the relationships of concepts like justice and wisdom to the practice and teaching of law.

"There's a theory in cognitive science (Mark Turner's, primarily, but I have to continue reading to know how he and Gilles Fauconnier collaborate)* that what makes us uniquely human is the ability to take ideas from two influencing spaces and create new distinct meanings. My dogs, for example, clearly see meaning in my putting on my boots and jacket at 6:00 a.m. (that "means" we are going for a walk), but, as far as I know, they aren't able to create metaphors from that influencing space into, say, poetry, or symbolism, or invention. I, on the other hand, impart so much metaphorical meaning into a bunch of young men beating the crap out of themselves 800 miles from here this afternoon (Hail to the Victors!) that I will either be elated or depressed come about four o'clock.

"I want to juxtapose thoughts about justice from two widely separated spaces. ..."

Continue reading here. Also check out the comments section, where Lipshaw discusses the Defining Wisdom project.

The coming of 'The Singularity'...or not?

2009-10-01T15:12:00Z

Imagine a future where computers exceed our own intelligence; where problem solving is no longer limited by human thinking -- what then? It's a moment in technological time some call 'The Singularity'. But how much is technological reality, and how much fantasy? Science writer Mike McRae catches up with AI researchers and sci-fi writers to ponder the possibilities and probabilities.

Download the podcast.

Insight: When the wisdom of crowds becomes the madness of mobs

2009-10-01T14:35:00Z

By Andrew Lo in Financial Times

"The financial crisis has challenged virtually every tenet of modern portfolio management.

Investors were told to diversify by holding broad-based long-only portfolios of index funds; those who did so by investing in small-cap, large-cap, value, growth, international, emerging-market, balanced and target-date funds all lost money last year.

Investors were told to manage their risk exposures by adjusting their strategic asset allocation between passive stock and bond index funds; last year was a heart-pounding roller-coaster ride regardless of asset allocation..."

Read the article.

In Character Issue on Wisdom

2009-10-01T14:18:00Z

The Fall 2009 issue of In Character, a publication dedicated to exploring single virtues from different persepctives, explores the concept of wisdom.

Table of Contents

Charlotte Hays
More Than Knowledge

William Desmond
Wisdom of the Ages

Charlotte Allen
Athena's Surprising Portfolio

Michael Walzer talks to IC
Interview

Jerome Groopman
The Best Medicine

Jonathan V. Last
The More, the Wiser?

William Voegeli and Jack N. Rakove
Are politicians today as wise as those
who produced the U.S. Constitution?

Diana West
Out of the Mouths of Babes

David F. Ford
New Life for Old Words

Michael Dirda
These Foolish Things

Ten Great Moments in the Annals of Wisdom

Henry Alford, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Roger Scruton, Amitai Etzioni, Kenneth Minogue, E. J. Dionne, Betsy Lunz, and Joan Roughgarden
Is there really such a thing as wisdom? If so, can it be taught?

Jeffery Paine
Quantum Buddha

Ronald Numbers
Mind & Matter

Mark Lasswell
That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles

Charlotte Hays
A Gift from Miss Carrie Lee

Link to the table of contents.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

How we read each other's minds

2009-09-28T17:50:00Z

By Rebecca Saxe | TED.com

"Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions."

Watch the video.

Image from a screenshot of presentation.

Global Legal Pluralism

2009-09-24T17:10:00Z

By Sandra Day O'Connor | Social Science Research Network

"This Article grapples with the complexities of law in a world of hybrid legal spaces, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes. In order to conceptualize this world, I introduce literature on legal pluralism, and I suggest that, following its insights, we need to realize that normative conflict among multiple, overlapping legal systems is unavoidable and might even sometimes be desirable, both as a source of alternative ideas and as a site for discourse among multiple community affiliations. Thus, instead of trying to stifle conflict either through an imposition of sovereigntist, territorially-based, prerogative or through universalist harmonization schemes, communities might sometimes seek (and increasingly are creating) a wide variety of procedural mechanisms, institutions, and practices for managing, without eliminating, hybridity. Such mechanisms, institutions, and practices can help mediate conflicts by recognizing that multiple communities may legitimately wish to assert their norms over a given act or actor, by seeking ways of reconciling competing norms, and by deferring to other approaches if possible. Moreover, when deference is impossible (because some instances of legal pluralism are repressive, violent, and/or profoundly illiberal), procedures for managing hybridity can at least require an explanation of why a decisionmaker cannot defer. In sum, pluralism offers not only a more comprehensive descriptive account of the world we live in, but also suggests a potentially useful alternative approach to the design of procedural mechanisms, institutions, and practices.

The Article proceeds in three parts. First, I summarize the literature on legal pluralism and suggest ways in which this literature helps us understand the global legal environment. Second, drawing on pluralist insights, I offer an analytical framework for addressing normative conflicts, one that provides an alternative both to territorially-based sovereigntism and to universalism, and instead opens space for the jurisgenerative interplay of multiple normative communities and commitments. This framework generates a series of values and principles that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of procedural mechanisms, institutional designs, and discursive practices for managing hybridity. Third, I survey a series of such mechanisms, institutions, and practices already in use in a wide variety of doctrinal contexts, and I discuss how they work (or sometimes fail to work) in actual practice. And though each of these mechanisms, institutions, and practices has been discussed individually in the scholarly literature, they have not generally been considered together through a pluralist lens, nor have they been evaluated based on their ability to manage and preserve hybridity. Thus, my analysis offers a significantly different approach, one that injects a distinct set of concerns into debates about global legal interactions. Indeed, although many of these mechanisms, institutions, and practices are often viewed as second-best accommodations between hardline sovereigntist and universalist positions, I argue that they might at least sometimes be preferable to either. In the conclusion, I suggest implications of this approach for more general thinking about the potential role of law in identifying and negotiating social and cultural difference."

Read the article.

We Are All Madoffs

2009-09-24T17:07:00Z

By David P. Barash | The Chronicle

"Everybody hates Bernard Madoff, and for good reason. He bilked hundreds—thousands—of people out of billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars, destroyed numerous life savings, ruined the future prospects of many of those who had trusted him, all the while living in ostentatious, and, it is now painfully clear, despicable luxury.

He did all this via what may be the largest Ponzi scheme in history. There is no question that Madoff was a perpetrator and not himself a victim: He was (and presumably still is) highly intelligent and sophisticated in the ways of the financial world. He knew precisely what he was doing, and did it nonetheless. In addition to celebrating his prison sentence, disinterested observers and victims alike therefore found themselves wondering aloud: What was he thinking?

Beyond the illegality of Madoff's scam, why didn't he consider his responsibility to his clients, to their future, and even to his own? Didn't he know that there would be a day of reckoning, that he couldn't keep up the crazy, fancy footwork indefinitely, that sooner or later his whole deceitful house of cards would come crashing down?"

Read the article.

What Makes Us Wise?

2009-09-23T16:26:00Z

By Julia Moulden | Huffington Post

"Is thinking about wisdom part of getting older?

Lately, I've been wondering what wisdom is. Here's how my dictionary defines it, "Understanding what is true, right, or lasting." I've been living with that definition to see if it seems, well, true, right, and lasting.

I also want to know what makes us wise. Is it something we can actively achieve? Or does it grow as a result of experiences well digested? Is it something, therefore, that comes with age? Or can the young be wise, too? Can you take a course? What's the best way to learn

And is wisdom a label we can attach to ourselves? Can we say - to anyone other than the mirror - with a straight face and no trace of hubris, "I am wise"? Or must others confer it?"

Read the article.

Image from Flikr Creative Commons.

Mastery

2009-09-23T16:22:00Z

By Jim Selman | Huffington Post

"Over the course of my lifetime, I have heard many 'bottom-line' bits of wisdom. For example, "the key to happiness is loving what you do". Or, "at the end of the day, you can either resist life or surrender and live life on life's terms". These kinds of nuggets are usually true and are certainly valid in a list of maxims and aphorisms for living. "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Robert Fulghum is a great example of this genre. My favorite (and the one that I have personally found the most useful) is one I first heard in the 1970s in something called the 'est training'. The ultimate choice we have as human beings, we were told, is whether we are 'at the effect' of our circumstances or whether we can relate to them 'at cause', meaning be responsible for everything in our lives.

Over the years, I've found this to be the case. Today I would say it a bit differently -- I have a choice about whether my experience and behavior is a 'reaction' to whatever is going on or whether I take action as an expression of my vision and commitments in the moment. Am I the actor or the 're-actor'? To even be aware that we have the choice to act or react seems to me to be the foundation for mastery of anything."

Read the article.

Twisdom: Twitter Wisdom

2009-09-23T15:58:00Z

By Tom Morris | Huffington Post

"The popular social media website Twitter has turned into the world's greatest cocktail party, and no one has to clean up afterwards, or even pay the tab. It's the new electronic campfire we sit around to talk and laugh and even sing. It's an endless conversation like no other, and it's just starting to pick up steam. We've all heard about how news breaks on Twitter before it hits any of the traditional journalistic outlets, and how it's being used by emergency responders in difficult situations around the world. But the potential overall cultural impact of Twitter is just beginning to be glimpsed.

Twitter is the new water cooler for the creative class -- the social break room for people who don't work in an office. And for those who do, it's the ultimate coffee break. With five or ten minutes of total immersion, you can be socializing with people all over the country and around the globe, sharing quick tales of weal and woe that range from the mundane to the metaphysical. There's instant advice, encouragement, and information to be had any time you stick your toes into the Twitter stream - if you've found a good spot on the bank of this wild new river to perch."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Minimally conscious patients can learn

2009-09-22T19:09:00Z

By Jessica Hamzelo | New Scientist

"A mere glimmer of consciousness is all that's required to learn something new.

Experiments inspired by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov have revealed that some people who are "minimally conscious" can learn to associate a sound with a sensation.

This might mean that learning new associations could help patients with consciousness disorders recover. It also suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact minimally conscious, and that the Pavlovian test might be a simpler, more objective way to distinguish between the two."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?

2009-09-17T20:27:00Z

By Kristina Grifantini | Technology Review

"When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.

Vassilis Kostakos, an assistant professor at the University of Madeira in Portugal and an adjunct assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), says that rating systems can tap into the "wisdom of the crowd" to offer useful insights, but they can also paint a distorted picture of a product if a small number of users do most of the voting. "It turns out people have very different voting patterns," he says, varying both among individuals and among communities of users.

Kostakos studied voting patterns on Amazon, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and the book review site BookCrossings. The research was presented last month at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing. His team looked at hundreds of thousands of items and millions of votes across the three sites. In each case, they found that a small number of users accounted for a large number of ratings. For example, only 5 percent of active Amazon users cast votes on more than 10 products. A handful of users voted hundreds of items."

Read the article.

From Baby Scientists to a Science of Social Learning

2009-09-14T14:57:00Z

By Andrew Meltzoff | Science News

"What does the science of learning tell us about the nature of intelligence?

People sometimes think of intelligence as a reflection of individual problem-solving skills. But we’re increasingly realizing that humans have special brain and cognitive mechanisms for social interaction. A powerful aspect of intelligence is the ability to solve problems collaboratively.

Individuals and groups incorporate knowledge passed along from others into new problem solutions and innovations. Computers and other modern technologies have greatly increased the impact of this type of intelligence. In business and science, innovative breakthroughs now come from those who leverage the intellectual power of groups. These advances aren’t going to come from a lone genius in a garret.

Do findings about learning have any practical implications for education?

More and more kids come to school as bilingual speakers or speaking a language other than English. Second-language learning, whether of English or another language, can potentially be improved by integrating social interactions into teaching methods.

Research shows that individual, face-to-face tutoring is the most effective form of school instruction. Learning researchers are now trying to develop intelligent tutoring systems that provide key elements of human tutoring while avoiding its extraordinary financial cost.

In one approach, adults learn a second language by interacting with a simulated tutor on a computer screen."

Read the interview.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Freeing the Mind to Forget

2009-09-09T17:55:00Z

By Karen Hopkin | Scientific American

"Some things are hard to remember. Others are hard to forget—especially things that are traumatic. But kids, it turns out, are better than adults at forgetting the bad stuff. Now scientists think they know why. According to an animal study in the September 4th issue of the journal Science, the brains of adults erect physical barriers that keep painful memories intact.

As adults, events that emotionally disturb us tend to get seared into our brains. And those memories can resurface, causing anxiety, fear and even post-traumatic stress disorder. But young brains are much more resilient—and can even erase unpleasant memories.

To get a better handle on this youthful forgetting, scientists studied the brains of young and old rats. They found that in adult brains, a physical net forms around certain cells in the amygdala, a structure associated with emotional memories. Adults that had been trained to associate a mild foot shock with a specific sound would flinch when they just heard the sound. But using a drug to dissolve this barrier restored the older rats’ ability to extinguish fearful memories. So rats that got the net-busting treatment stayed calm when they heard the sound.

One of the few instances where a net loss is a real gain."

Listen to the podcast.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Abruptly Forgotten: Working Memory Disappears in a Blink

2009-09-09T17:49:00Z

By JR Minkel | Scintific American

"When you go from bed to bathroom on a dark night, a quick flick of the lights will leave a lingering impression on your mind’s eye. For decades evidence suggested that such visual working memories—which, even in daylight, connect the dots to create a complete scene as the eyes dart around rapidly—fade gradually over the span of several seconds. But a clever new study reported in the journal Psychological Science finds that such memories actually stay sharp until they are suddenly lost.

Cognitive psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Stephen J. Luck, both at the University of California, Davis, tested subjects’ recall for the hues of colored squares flashed briefly on a screen up to 10 seconds earlier. Subjects marked their answer on a color wheel. If memories decay gradually, the guesses should have become increasingly imprecise as time wore on, evidenced by participants selecting yellow or red, for example, when the correct choice was orange. Instead subjects went straight from fairly accurate answers to random choices—no better than chance—indicating the memories were decaying all at once. According to Zhang and Luck’s mathematical analysis, most subjects’ memories went “poof” somewhere between four and 10 seconds after the stimulus."

Read the article.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

2009-09-03T20:31:00Z

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

Watch the video.

Image is a screenshot from the video.

Happiness: A buyer’s guide

2009-08-31T20:05:00Z

By Drake Bennett

"Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can’t. Philosophers and gurus, holy books and self-help manuals have all warned of the futility of equating material gain with true well-being.

Modern research generally backs them up. Psychologists and economists have found that while money does matter to your sense of happiness, it doesn’t matter that much. Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, and house themselves, having more money - even a lot more money - makes them only a little bit happier. So there’s quantitative proof for the preachings of St. Francis and the wisdom of the Buddha. Bad news for hard-charging bankers; good news for struggling musicians.

But starting to emerge now is a different answer to that age-old question. A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

2009-08-31T20:02:00Z

By Kathleen McGowan

"Rita Magil was driving down a Montreal boulevard one sunny morning in 2002 when a car came blasting through a red light straight toward her. “I slammed the brakes, but I knew it was too late,” she says. “I thought I was going to die.” The oncoming car smashed into hers, pushing her off the road and into a building with large cement pillars in front. A pillar tore through the car, stopping only about a foot from her face. She was trapped in the crumpled vehicle, but to her shock, she was still alive.

The accident left Magil with two broken ribs and a broken collarbone. It also left her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a desperate wish to forget. Long after her bones healed, Magil was plagued by the memory of the cement barriers looming toward her. “I would be doing regular things—cooking something, shopping, whatever—and the image would just come into my mind from nowhere,” she says. Her heart would pound; she would start to sweat and feel jumpy all over. It felt visceral and real, like something that was happening at that very moment.

Most people who survive accidents or attacks never develop PTSD. But for some, the event forges a memory that is pathologically potent, erupting into consciousness again and again. “PTSD really can be characterized as a disorder of memory,” says McGill University psychologist Alain Brunet, who studies and treats psychological trauma. “It’s about what you wish to forget and what you cannot forget.” This kind of memory is not misty and watercolored. It is relentless."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Seeking

2009-08-31T20:00:00Z

By Emily Yoffe

"Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey." "

Read the article.

How to turn knowledge into wisdom

2009-08-26T15:30:00Z

By Alice Landry | Examiner

"Knowledge is information that you've been exposed to and integrated into your mind as something you know and are aware of.

Once you've been presented with something new and learn about it, at what point does that knowledge translate into wisdom?

True wisdom is more than just applied knowledge. You may be able to "see one, do one, teach one," but that doesn't necessarily qualify you as a wise person.

For example, you know you shouldn't smoke, and you decide to quit. Yet you continue with a daily struggle, your stress level and blood pressure increases, and you end up substituting one addiction for another. Does that constitute wisdom?"

Read the full article.

Does Language Shape What We Think?

2009-08-26T15:27:00Z

By Joshua Hartshorne | Scientific American

"My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.

Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage."

Read the full article.

Wisdom is one virtue that improves with age

2009-08-26T15:20:00Z

By Val Farmer | INFORUM

"There is one quality that improves with age. That quality happens to be a wonderful virtue. It is wisdom.

Wisdom encompasses other virtues.

Wisdom incorporates other virtues that are essential to happiness. A wise person will have embraced principles of love, service and concern for others as a part of one’s life. These are the essence of success in human relationships. A wise person will have learned that.

Also, a truly wise person governs his or her own life according to high standards of human conduct. Thus, being wise means having learned to be good. Not living by the truth one knows is to be a fool. Wise people have excellent character.

In wisdom, experience counts.

This is where age has an advantage. However, just living long isn’t enough to make a person wise. A person can have many experiences and still not learn much."

Read the article.

Mapping the Brain's Highways

2009-08-19T15:09:00Z

By Azeen Ghorahi

" 'The human brain has been terra incognita for as long as we’ve known it,' says Olaf Sporns, a professor of neuroscience at Indiana University. In 2005, Sporns co-authored a paper attributing the large-scale shortcomings of comprehensive neuroscience research to a lack of a foundational, anatomical description of the brain: In order to properly navigate this “unknown land,” he said, we must first draw a map.

Sporns proposed calling this map the “connectome.” As a thorough atlas of the connections in the brain, the name deliberately conjures associations with the enormously successful human genome map that had been sequenced two years prior. Now, four years after Sporns’ initial paper, the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research is launching the $30 million Human Connectome Project (HCP) in hopes of creating a comprehensive map of a healthy adult brain by 2015"

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Tapping the Investing Wisdom of Crowds

2009-08-14T18:36:00Z

By David Bogoslaw from Businessweek

"Can a sentiment survey of a bunch of individual investors actually predict stock price performance? Crowd Technologies—a neophyte online investing community whose Web site Piqqem enables people to vote on the direction they believe individual stocks will follow—has begun to collect data that shows a correlation between changes in sentiment over short periods of time and the propensity for earnings to outperform or underperform market forecasts.

Piqqem is based on the concept of the wisdom of crowds, the belief that a sufficiently big and diverse group of people will over time be more accurate in their estimates and predictions than even the most talented individuals. Jett Winter, Piqqem's chief executive, has a background in software and has headed multiple startups in Silicon Valley over the past 25 years. He also runs an investment bank, Winter Advisors, and is interested in the trading opportunities that will come out of crowdsourcing stock sentiment."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

The wisdom of teenagers

2009-08-11T19:05:00Z

"A report by a 15-year-old work experience student at an investment banking firm, about teenagers and the media, says young people don't listen to the radio, go to the cinema or use Twitter. But are there other teenage habits that might come as a surprise?

When Matthew Robson, on work experience from his London school at US bank Morgan Stanley, was asked to describe his friends' media habits, he had little idea the impact his answers would have.

His report has been the talk of web bosses and media analysts, and even caused a ripple at a conference in Idaho, US, attended by some of the world's leading figures in new media."

Read the article.

NPR Science Friday on Decision Making

2009-08-04T20:20:00Z

Friday, July 24th NPR Science Friday

Paper or plastic? Steak or salmon? Stay or go? Every day, we make thousands of decisions, most minor, some major. But how does your brain make the choice? In this hour, we'll take a look at the science of decision making. Can your genes influence split second decisions? And how do your emotions influence the way you decide?

Hear the show.

You Know More than You Think

2009-07-28T19:20:00Z

By Jack Soll and Richard Larrick from Scientific American.

"There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members. In an early demonstration of the phenomenon, for example, Columbia University’s Hazel Knight asked students to estimate the temperature in a classroom. When the estimates were averaged together, the resulting group answer was more accurate than the estimate of a typical member.

Early authors found this surprising and attributed it to some mysterious group property. Eventually, however, it was recognized as a product of statistics: Using a large sample of imperfect estimates tends to cancel out extreme errors and converge on the truth. Subsequent research in forecasting demonstrated the power of averaging compared to more sophisticated statistical methods of combination. The power and simplicity of averaging was summed up in the title of James Surowiecki’s 2004 best-selling book, “The Wisdom of Crowds."

Read the article.

Mindless Collectives Better at Rational Decision-Making Than Brainy Individuals

2009-07-28T19:07:00Z

By: Charles Q. Choi from Scientific American

"Humans often make irrational choices when faced with challenging decisions. Ant colonies, however, can make perfectly rational selections when confronted by tough dilemmas. This isn't because lone ants are especially knowledgeable—they're not. Instead, when ants are grouped together, a kind of "wisdom of the crowds" avoids the kind of mistakes that individuals can make, new research shows.

In terms of evolutionary biology, animals strive to maximize their fitness. Still, actions that seem counterproductive and irrational occur not only in human societies, but also all over the animal kingdom. For instance, when honeybees and hummingbirds have two equally tempting choices of nectar, a third alternative inferior to both can sway them to prefer one of the initial two options over the other. The animals apparently compare the inferior choice against the originals and conclude that one of the originals is better, even though nothing about them has changed."

Read the article.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Cocksure

2009-07-28T14:51:00Z

Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence.

Excerpt: "Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological..."

by Malcolm Gladwell

Read the article from the New Yorker.

Ants and Neurons

2009-07-27T19:36:00Z

Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision...

by Elizabeth Lindhardt in Seed Magazine.

Read the article.

Bloggingheads: What Is Wisdom?

2009-07-23T15:14:00Z

Rex Jung, left, of the Mind Research Network and Robert Sternberg of Tufts University discuss a scientific understanding of wisdom.

Discussants ask: "How different is wisdom from intelligence? Are smart people more susceptible to foolishness?"

From NYT.

Watch the video.

3 ways the brain creates meaning

2009-07-20T20:13:00Z

By Tom Wujec

"Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called the Big Viz. And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards from Autodesk made 650 sketches that strive to capture the essence of each presenter's ideas. And the consensus was, it really worked. These sketches brought to life the key ideas, the portraits, the magic moments that we all experienced last year.

This year we were thinking, "Why does it work?" What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations, that create meaning? And this is an important question to ask and answer. Because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning, the better we can communicate. And I also think, the better we can think and collaborate together. So this year we're going to visualize how the brain visualizes.

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of "Ah-ha moments," or moments of discovery, through various processes."

Watch the Video.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds

2009-07-17T13:59:00Z

By Michael Bond

"The protests that took place on the streets of London on the eve of the G20 summit in April lived up to many people's expectations. Around 2000 protestors turned up, and were heavily marshalled by police. There was a bit of trouble, but the police tactics - specifically, the decision to corral the entire crowd into a small area near the Bank of England, an approach known as "kettling" - kept a lid on the violence.

That, at least, is the official version of events, and it reflects a belief about crowds that is shared by police, governments and to a large degree the general public across the world: that they are hotbeds of trouble and must be contained. Trouble is seen as especially likely when something goes wrong at a large gathering. Under such circumstances, the expectation is that the crowd will lose its head and all hell will break loose."

Read the article from New Scientist.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons

Financial Planning Gets Personal

2009-07-02T16:16:00Z

This article includes pieces of an interview with Defining Wisdom grantee Keith Whitaker.

"Shortly after Andrea and Rick Campbell got married, when Rick was fresh out of graduate school, Andrea’s parents suggested the young couple could benefit from a trip to their financial planner Before they knew it, the Reading, Mass., couple were being poked and prodded—gently, but still—by a man they’d just met. They had a kid on the way. Any plans for more? Had they considered how they’d want to live if one or the other died? Rick found himself talking about his parents’ divorce, his dad’s death and his childhood messages about money. “Are we going to get Prozac at the end of this?” Rick wondered. He caught Andrea’s eye across the table: Was this financial planning?..."

by Janet Paskin from SmartMoney Magazine

Read the article.

The Brain Collector

2009-07-01T21:16:00Z

by Greg Miller

Neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese plans to create a digital, zoomable atlas of the brain of Henry Molaison, the most studied human being in the history of psychology, and make it freely available online—the first entry in what he hopes will become an open-access brain library to be used by scientists, students, or anyone with an Internet connection and an interest in neuroanatomy. Ultimately, the library will include donated brains from people with Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders, Annese says, as well as a collection of healthy brains of different ages. But for now, Molaison's brain is the star attraction.

Read the article from Science.

Naked Strong Evaluation

2009-07-01T21:06:00Z

By Andrew Koppelman

Commentary on A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief.

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights—a commitment that does not follow from atheism as such...

Read the article from Dissent.

What is "The Good Society"?

2009-07-01T21:00:00Z

By Michael Walzer

Preliminary Dialogue: The co-editor of Dissent argues with a philosophical friend to determine the truth (or a truth) of the matter.

MW: The definite article is wrong. How could there be one good society, given the immense variety of human cultures?

A Philosophical Friend: Well, there is one human nature, recognizable across many historical and cultural settings. So why shouldn’t there be one good society that “fits” human nature and enables all men and women to reach their highest potential? Isn’t this the goal of philosophy since its Greek beginnings, and of most of the world’s religions, especially the monotheistic ones (think of the city on the hill, the holy commonwealth, the messianic kingdom), and of the left also for the last several centuries? Isn’t the pursuit of justice, truth, and beauty also, simultaneously, the pursuit of the good society, in which our higher nature would finally be fulfilled?

MW: But surely what is most distinctive about humanity is its creative power—to think, imagine, speculate, argue, and disagree. So men and women will imagine different good societies, argue about their political and economic arrangements, and disagree about which one is best...

Read the full article from Dissent.

Calculating Consumer Happiness at Any Price

2009-07-01T19:40:00Z

By John Tierney

"Could it be that humans are not quite as gullible as advertised?

For a couple of decades now, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been amusing themselves manipulating consumers into doing odd things. They’ve delighted in debunking the notion of homo economicus, that theoretical creature who rationally seeks maximum economic utility..."

Read the article from the New York Times.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

15 Ways to Fix the World

2009-07-01T18:56:00Z

"Make no little plans," said President Barack Obama last spring as he rolled out a pitch for a high-speed rail network—yet another presidential initiative to lift America out of recession and chart a new national course. In that spirit, The Atlantic offers a few modest proposals for making the world a better place.

Read the articles.

Get Smarter

2009-07-01T18:49:00Z

Jamais Cascio writes for The Atlantic on evolving human intelligence.

"Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?"

Read the article.

The wisdom of engineers

2009-06-30T14:29:00Z

"Philosophical questions about the external world and our knowledge of it are almost exclusively raised from the armchair. The knowledge we gain in everyday life or develop through scientific investigation is considered at the conceptual level, and its claim as genuine knowledge is assessed in abstraction from its exercise and application. This intellectually aloof manner is one reason that Anglo-American philosophy tends not to inform itself directly with scientific findings. Empirical studies of the world are apt for philosophical analysis, but few philosophers use them to inform that analysis. It is not surprising therefore that engineering has so far been uncharted territory for philosophers. But what would philosophers learn if they engaged with this practical discipline, a discipline that seeks not to understand the world but to change it?"

by Natasha McCarthyin The Philosophers' Magazine

Read the full article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The New Interface of Governance

2009-06-22T18:04:00Z

The New Interface of Governance

Frontier / by Nancy Scola

"If we can just tweak the way we make choices, we can make smarter ones. A look at Obama’s plans to put the science of human nature to work.

For those of us familiar with the strange land that is Washington, DC, it’s tempting to snicker a bit at the sudden star turn of the field of behavioral economics in our nation’s capital. Books like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits are being passed around like samizdat. Human beings, the thinking goes, bear little more than a passing resemblance to the “economic man” of classic econ textbooks. We’re messy creatures, not altogether skilled at maximizing value, or efficiency, or all those other things our self-interest is supposed to drive us to attain..."

Read the article from Seed.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

An oath to be ethical

2009-06-10T19:21:00Z

Alejo José G. Sison, a Business Ethics scholar at the University of Navarre, writes for MercatorNet that "Twenty percent of students graduating from the Harvard Business School this week have taken an oath to be ethical. What a difference is that going to make?"

Read the article.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Kass Backwards

2009-06-02T15:28:00Z

By Scott McLemee

"Last week Leon Kass, chairman of the Council of Bioethics under President Bush, took to the podium to deliver the Jefferson Lecture of the National Endowment for the Humanities -- an event I did not go to, though it was covered by one of IHE's intrepid reporters.

My reluctance to attend suggests that, without noticing it, I have come to accept Kass’s best-known idea, “the wisdom of repugnance.” There is, alas, all too little evidence I am getting any wiser with age -- but my visceral aversion to hearing a Bush appointee talk about human values is inarguable.

As you may recall, Kass wrote in the late 1990s that biotechnological developments such as cloning are “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it.” In our rising gorge, he insisted, “we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.... Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder...”

Read the article from Inside Higher Ed.

The Empathy Nominee

2009-05-29T14:08:00Z

"In making Sonia Sotomayor his first nominee for the Supreme Court yesterday, President Obama appears to have found the ideal match for his view that personal experience and cultural identity are the better part of judicial wisdom..."

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal

Photo by SonnyandSandy.

This revolution will be digitized: online tools for radical collaboration

2009-05-20T18:15:00Z

This article in Disease Models & Mechanisms posits an exciting possibility for the development of scientific collaboration. Could a globalized collective wisdom be the answer to optimizing scientific progress?

"What if everyone in the world were in your lab – a ‘hive mind’ of sorts, but composed of countless creative intellects rather than mindless worker ants, and one in which resources, reagents and effort could be shared, along with ideas, in a manner not dictated by institutional and geographical constraints?"

Source: Disease Models & Mechanisms

Workshop: Practical Reasoning

2009-05-13T18:31:00Z

We are pleased announce the Scottish Network for Normative Philosophy’s Workshop on Practical Reasoning. The Scottish Network for Normative Philosophy is dedicated to promoting the research of contemporary Scottish philosophers on normative themes, and this is the first of three workshops on normative issues. The second will be held in Stirling (Autumn 2009) on epistemic normativity, while the third will be in Glasgow (Autumn 2010) on normative themes in perception and emotion. This workshop will be held at the University of Edinburgh’s new Informatics Forum and the Philosophy Department’s new home in the Dugald Stewart Building, on Sunday June 28th to Monday June 29th, 2009. This event is part of the Department of Philosophy's Ethics research cluster.

To learn more about the upcoming conference, visit its website.

Photo by Jason Rogers.

Poor Decision Making

2009-05-13T18:29:00Z

This article about economic decision making was written by one of our grant recipients, Sendhil Mullainathan.

"All too often, the choices of the poor are viewed as a result of either some intrinsic failing (“they’re just very myopic people”) or some deep psychological feature of poverty (“they’re desperate”). Behavioral economics — the integration of psychological insights into economic analysis — offers a third interpretation: All of us face difficulties in making the right choices; the poor are just asked to do it more often and in tougher circumstances.

"This perspective will eventually alter the way we fight poverty. It should affect the way in which governments in developing countries set their policies, donor agencies like the World Bank provide aid, and foundations and others give support. In much the same way that the move toward market-oriented policies transformed policymaking, I think a psychologically richer view of poverty will transform both how we understand and how we deal with poverty. As a behavioral economist, I am optimistic that this influence will be for the positive."

Read the rest of the article here.

Defining wisdom: An unmarketable commodity

2009-05-13T18:25:00Z

This recent opinion piece offers a critique of the project of defining wisdom, along with some thoughts about wisdom in connection to Asian philosophies.

"Wisdom doesn't cling. It knows when to commit and when to detach. It is wary of extremes, tries to reconcile the opposites of the real and ideal worlds, knows when to strike and when to hold back. Wisdom trusts in God but tethers its camel, praises the Lord but passes the ammunition. It is never surprised by anything that nature may inflict upon us, nor by anything that human beings may do. It knows that we are a flawed but promising species, somewhere on the long, hard road from ape to angel, labouring along that road by fits and starts, now leaping ahead, now falling back.

"Rooted in the central truth that everything is transient, wisdom accepts impermanence like a Stoic and resolves to do the best it can with transient things for as long as life shall last."

Read the rest of the article here.

Swarm Savvy

2009-05-13T18:21:00Z

This article from Science News discusses recent research on collective behavior and decision-making in animals, which has interesting implications for researching human wisdom.

"Of course honeybees don’t have a banking system, but they do exhibit collective behavior. The queen bee doesn’t decide what the colony needs to do. Instead, each colony member does her or his bee thing, and out of hundreds or thousands of interactions, a collective decision emerges. Seeley’s next book, due out in 2010, will be called Honeybee Democracy.

"Bees, ants, locusts and plenty of other animals collectively make life-or-death choices. The biologists studying animal groups are finding strange lab fellows these days in economists, social scientists, even money market specialists. They are trading tales of humans and of nonhuman animals to understand collective behavior and what makes it go right or wrong."

Read the rest of the article here.

The Wisdom of Intentional Ignorance

2009-04-24T17:46:00Z

A Psychology Today Blog by Howard C. Nusbaum, Ph.D. on March 27, 2009

"Given the cultural lip service in the United States to the importance of education, you might think that ignorance is uniformly undesirable. In principle, we should seek to improve our knowledge in all circumstances. However in recent months, with the disaster that has hit the global economy, ignorance may be more blissful than one would have thought..."

Read the full post

Neurobiology of wisdom article receives flurry of media attention

2009-04-13T21:13:00Z

Our featured article "The Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature Overview," by Thomas W. Meeks and Dilip V. Jeste has generated much media attention in the past few weeks (Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2009;66(4):355-365). Here we list some of the articles and provide links to their full texts:

"Wired for wisdom: Two UCSD psychiatrists suggest a neurobiological model of sagacity" by Scott LaFee in the San Diego Unio Tribune. Read the article.

"Pathway to Wisdom May Be Found in Brain Circuitry: The common traits of wisdom appear to follow a universal path in the brain" in U.S. News. Read the article.

"Scientists 'discover' source of wisdom in the human brain" in Daily Mail. Read the article.

"Is wisdom in the brain?" by Jordan Lite in Scientific American. Read the article.

"Is There A Seat Of Wisdom In The Brain?" at Science Daily. Read the article.

"Where shall wisdom be found?" by Mary Brophy Marcus in USA Today. Read the article.

"Found: the brain’s centre of wisdom" by Jonathan Leake in Times Online. Read the article.

Photo by Gaetan Lee.

Rewiring the Brain: Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering

2009-03-31T15:07:00Z

Scientists at MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab are genetically engineering mice such that certain genetic regions associated with brain functions can be switched on and off by the presence or absence of certain wavelengths of light. They call this "applied neuroscience" or neuroengineering.

Read the full article by Quinn Norton from Wired

Why Minds are not like Computers

2009-03-31T15:04:00Z

"People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer. When theorizing about the mind, especially to outsiders but also to one another, defenders of artificial intelligence (AI) often rely on computational concepts. They regularly describe the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, the mind as a “pattern” and the brain as a “substrate,” senses as “inputs” and behaviors as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units” and synapses as “circuitry,” to give just a few common examples..."

Read the full article from The New Atlantis by Ari N. Shulman

Reviews of "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism"

2009-03-31T14:28:00Z

From the publisher: "The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity..." Read more

A review from Financial Times by Clive Crook "Timely look at our animal behavior."

Another review from The New York Observer by Andrew Rosenblum "Citizens Keynes."

White House budget director Peter Orszag reads "Animal Spirits," an article from Time.

The New Co-op Capitalism

2009-03-26T17:50:00Z

"The first full crisis of globalization means the start of a kinder, more selfless economic system.

There are some who say this current global financial recession, this recession/depression that is being felt in London and New York, in Shanghai and Sao Paolo, will not have an impact on the nature of capitalism. That five years from now, well, capitalism will basically look like it did six months ago..."

by Noreena Hertz

Read the article at The Daily Beast

Video on Wisdom of Crowds

2009-03-18T21:44:00Z

"This discussion was a fun yet informative study of the psychology behind community building and interaction on Websites. This video highlights some of presenter Derek Powazek’s “wisdom” concepts."

Link to the video.

From Texas State new media grad student schronicle.

In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue

2009-03-03T14:51:00Z

by Natalie Angier in NYT

"In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine...."

Read the article

What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions

2009-03-03T14:27:00Z

Decisions, Decisions in The Economist Feb. 13 2009 print edition

"DICTATORS and authoritarians will disagree, but democracies work better. It has long been held that decisions made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals..."

Read the article

Photo by bolti22

Religion and the Public Sphere

2009-02-27T22:03:00Z

by Jürgen Habermas & Paolo Flores d'Arcais in The Utopian.

"The Utopian is very proud to present this fascinating debate between Jürgen Habermas and Paolo Flores d'Arcais, making Habermas' response to d'Arcais - in which he argues for religion's role in the public sphere with unprecedented vigour - available in English translation for the first time..."

Read the article

Philosophy’s great experiment

2009-02-27T22:00:00Z

Published in Prospect's March 2009 edition by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburto:

"Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it..."

Read the full article

Bloggers on Experimental Philosophy respond to the article. Read it here.

The Real Crisis? We Stopped Being Wise

2009-02-27T21:55:00Z

In The Huffington Post, posted February 16, 2009

Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College, makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world...

Read the full article and watch the video

'How to Live' by Henry Alford

2009-02-13T19:50:00Z

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an article about How to Live, by Henry Alford, a comedian who set out to write a book about wisdom.

"Nothing distresses one of my friends more than hearing that someone has died short of their 70th birthday and Psalm 90's promise of three score and 10 years. For Henry Alford, humorist and Thurber Prize recipient, the loss is more concrete. "If people are repositories of knowledge," he notes, "and the death of an old person, an African saying runs, is like the burning of a library -- then I want a library card. I want borrowing privileges for the rest of my life."

"In "How to Live," Alford seeks to capture that wisdom "before it slips off into the night" by plumbing the years beyond the biblical promise, a time the mid-40s writer hopes are ripe for "realizations and breakthroughs." To do that, he sets out on a multi-pronged odyssey, combing through "wisdom literature," psychosocial studies as well as interviewing those who've outlived the Psalms' prophecy."

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Reuters UK also printed an interview with Alford.

"Q: Did you come to a conclusion as to what defines wisdom?

A: "It's such a slippery topic, it's like sculpting with mashed potatoes. There are about 9 million definitions, but you can talk about five general principles -- reciprocity, doubt, non-attachment, working for the social good, and discretion. I never point-blank say wisdom is this, because it's so many things.""

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

Richard Trowbridge Speaks on Critical Thinking and Wisdom

2009-02-05T21:56:00Z

Richard Trowbridge (Bryant & Stratton College) will be presenting a paper at the Central Division meeting of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking [AILACT]. The title of Richard's discussion will be "Critical Thinking and Wisdom." The meeting will be held on Friday evening February 20, 2009, at 7:00-10:00, in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association conference, at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago.

The AILACT Group Meeting at the 2009 Central APA Meeting, Chicago:

Friday, Feb. 20, 7:00-10:00

Chair:

Kevin Possin (Winona State University)

Speakers:

Gary Seay (Medgar Evars College/CUNY) and Susana Nuccetelli (St. Cloud State University)

"Critical Thinking as an Autonomous Discipline"

Richard Trowbridge (Bryant & Stratton College)

"Critical Thinking and Wisdom"

Panel Discussion:

"Critical Thinking: General or Domain-Specific Skills"

Jerry Kapus (University of Wisconsin-Stout), Frank Fair (Sam Houston State University), and Jan Sobocan (University of Western Ontario)

Photo by Grufnik.

Wisdom Workshop at Fordham University

2009-02-05T20:29:00Z

The Fordham University Philosophy Department presents a

Wisdom Workshop

Friday, April 17th
2009
Fordham University
Lincoln Center Campus
New York City

Despite the fact that philosophia is literally the love of wisdom, contemporary philosophers have given limited attention to the concept of wisdom. This one-day workshop aims to revive and promote discussion of this ancient notion by exploring the ethical and epistemological dimensions of wisdom, from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

11:00 am –12:45 pm
Gabriel Richardson Lear (University of Chicago)
"Aristotle on Leisure, Flourishing, and Wise Deliberation"
Respondent: Katja Vogt (Columbia University)

2:00 – 3:45 pm
Charles Larmore (Brown University)
"Cleverness, Knowledge, and Wisdom"
Respondent: Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota)

4:00–5:45 pm
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
"Wisdom and Virtue Epistemology"
Respondent: John Greco (St. Louis University)

The workshop is free and open to the public. Talks will be held on the 12th Floor of the Lowenstein Building, 113 W. 60th St., at Fordham's Lincoln Center Campus in New York City. For information, contact Allan Hazlett at ahazlett@fordham.edu or visit our website at www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/wisdom/

It's the Media, Not Juveniles, Who Are Delinquent: A Panic About Names

2009-02-04T19:41:00Z

Defining Wisdom grantee John Pfaff critiques a recent paper entitled "First Names and Crime: Does Unpopularity Spell Trouble?," written by two economists at Shippensburg University, David Karlist and Daniel Lee, in the Huffington Post. The article claims that there is a relationship between the likelihood of criminal behavior and a person's first name. For Pfaff, this critique points to a deeper problem in the empirical social sciences: the lack of "effective and rigorous means for assessing whether a study is good or bad."

Pfaff is an associate professor of Law at Fordham Law School. His project for the Defining Wisdom project is entitled "Incorporating Systematic Sources of Knowledge into the Social Sciences and the Law."

"Papers around the world, from the Chicago Tribune to the Daily Telegraph to the Times of India, along with respectable blogs such as Science Daily, have likely terrified hundreds, if not thousands, of parents. All are reporting on an empirical paper making an eye-catching claim: give your male child an unpopular name, and you have condemned him to a life of crime. Amazon must be doing brisk business selling baby-naming books today..."

Read the full article

Photo by photoflux.

MSNBC covers "Defining Wisdom" in "Are old people really wise?"

2009-01-13T14:44:00Z

MSNBC reporter Robin Lloyd interviews Defining Wisdom grantees Deborah Coen ("Uncertain Ground: A Historical Tectonics of Wisdom"), Ankur Gupta ("Wisdom is Compression: Data Compression as a Mathematical Measure of Wisdom"), and Jean Gordon ("Wisdom in Words: The Relationship Between Language Use and the Perception of Wisdom") for a story about the Defining Wisdom project.

Are Old People Really Wise?
Scholars tackle murky concept of wisdom
By Robin Lloyd

December 15, 2008

"There is more information than ever at our fingertips, yet we're none the wiser it seems.

And many old people are wise, as most of them will tell you, but sometimes they can't remember your name, so how smart is that?

It's paradoxes like these that lie at the heart of a new $2 million research project called Defining Wisdom. Based at the University of Chicago, the four-year initiative, supported by the Templeton Foundation, has enlisted 23 scholars ranging from historians to economists to psychologists to computer scientists to examine the idea of wisdom, with the aim of cultivating it and better understanding its nature.

Definitions of wisdom are all over the map, even among the funded scholars interviewed for this story. The communications scientist says wisdom involves intelligence that is sensitive to the needs of others and makes a good use of judgment. The computer scientist says wisdom involves being able to quickly access information from compressed datasets. And the historian refuses to impose a definition and prefers to draw it out of the historical contexts she studies..."

Read Entire Article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28238648/

Wisdom: 50 Unique and Original Portraits

2009-01-12T16:28:00Z

by Andrew Zuckerman

"Inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman interviewed, photographed and filmed 50 of the world's great writers, actors, artists, designers, politicians, musicians and religious and business leaders of our time. He posed seven questions to each of his subjects-all over 65 years of age-and their candid responses offer uniquely inspirational and often surprising insights.

Thoughts from Nelson Mandela, Frank Gehry, Judi Dench, The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Clint Eastwood, Ted Kennedy, Robert Redford, Vaclav Havel, Terence Conran, Buzz Aldrin, Lou Reed, Willie Nelson, Madeline Albright, Jane Goodall, Burt Bacharach, Andrew Wyeth, Vanessa Redgrave, Nadine Gordimer and many more reveal lifetimes of adversity and triumph, and present intimate insights into very public lives."

See http://wisdombook.org

See the Publisher's Website

Newsweek features Defining Wisdom in "Don’t Forget the Owls"

2009-01-12T16:04:00Z

By Jerry Adler | NEWSWEEK

"The quest for wisdom is as old as Socrates, but it's also an up-to-the-minute economic indicator. A contrarian one: when things are going well, you don't have to go searching for wisdom. It streams nonstop over CNBC, its avatars sit smugly atop the Forbes list of billionaires and each day it proves again the eternal truths of the free market. Then in due course things go to hell; the sages and gurus humbly confess their ignorance to Congress or a grand jury, and the search for new paradigms begins. Tellingly, scholars date the modern scientific study of wisdom to the work of the American psychologist Vivian Clayton in the malaise-ridden 1970s. Clayton devised the first empirical tests for wisdom, which she defined as the ability to acquire knowledge and analyze it both logically and emotionally-picking up on the work begun by Socrates, around the time the Peloponnesian War began to turn into what we would call a "quagmire."

So it's no coincidence that several dozen researchers in fields ranging from neuroscience to art, music and law have just received wisdom-seeking grants under the auspices of the University of Chicago. The $2.7 million program, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is called Defining Wisdom, a name that implies the researchers will know what they were looking for once they find it..."

Go to the Newsweek article

Roger C. Schank discusses wisdom on Edge.org World Questions 2009

2009-01-06T21:09:00Z

For all responses from Edge.org to the question "What will change everything?" go to The World Questions Center 2009. Here, many intellectuals from around the globe adress the question of "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

ROGER C. SCHANK
Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Engines for Education Inc.; Author, Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own

WISDOM REBORN

"An executive of a consumer products company who I know was worrying about how to make the bleach his company produces better. He thought it would be nice if the bleach didn't cause "collateral damage." That is, he wanted it to harm bad stuff without harming good stuff. He seized upon the notion of collateral damage and began to wonder where else collateral damage was a problem. Chemotherapy came to mind and he visited some oncologists who gave him some ideas about what they did to make chemotherapy less harmful tp patients. He then applied those same ideas to improve his company's bleach.

He began to wonder about what he had done and how he had done it. He wanted to be able to do this sort of thing again. But what is this sort of thing and how can one do it again?

In bygone days we lived in groups that had wise men (and women) who told stories to younger people if they thought that those stories might be relevant to their needs. This was called wisdom and teaching and it served as way of passing one generation's experiences to the next..."

Read entire article here: http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_1.html#schank

The wisdom of the swarm

2008-12-29T16:43:00Z

This article offers an example of wisdom in the context of the biological sciences, suggesting that some insects form swarms in order to avoid predation.

Source: The Scientist

The propensity of locusts to form huge swarms and blanket landscapes may have evolved as a strategy to disrupt foraging by predators such as small mammals, lizards, and birds, according to research published today.

"If the [locusts] are dispersed and in large numbers, a predator can move through an environment preying on the food and sustain itself," explained Andy Reynolds, a biomathematician at Rothamsted Research in the UK and lead author on the paper, which appears in today's (Dec. 18) issue of Current Biology. "If the [locusts] bunch up and form large groups, then from the point of view of a predator, the environment is sparse."

A New Science of Virtues Grant Competition

2008-11-17T23:20:00Z

The Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce a new $3 million research program on a New Science of Virtues. This is a multidisciplinary research initiative that seeks contributions from individuals and from teams of investigators working within the humanities and the sciences. We support highly original, scholarly projects that demonstrate promise of a distinctive contribution to virtue research and have the potential to begin a new field of interdisciplinary study.

In 2010, about twenty (20), two-year research grants will be awarded ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Scholars and scientists from around the world are invited to submit Letters of Intent (LOI) as entry into a research grant competition.

For a description of the required Letter of Intent and more information about a New Science of Virtues, go to: www.scienceofvirtues.org or contact us directly at virtues@uchicago.edu

Defining Wisdom RFP Project featured in the "Templeton Report"

2008-11-17T22:18:00Z

The Nov. 12, 2008 issue of the Templeton Report featured an overview of the Defining Wisdom RFP Project at the University of Chicago. The Templeton Report: News from the John Templeton Foudation is a twice monthly electronic newsletter from the foundation featuring itesm on current research, initiatives, and events.

Read the report (link).

Subscribe to the Templeton Report (link)

Update to Richard Trowbridge's Work

2008-09-12T17:35:00Z

Richard Trowbridge has been collecting and commenting on empirical studies of Wisdom for many years. In addition to his dissertation, he maintains the list on his website. For those digging into the subject, this is a wealth of information. His site, wisdomcenteredlife.org is a wealth of information:

From his January, 2008 update:

The fact that empirical psychologists have found any way to study wisdom seems a major advance: before 1980, there had never been an empirical study of wisdom published in a scholarly journal. Research to date has hardly revealed truths about wisdom that go beyond ancient and medieval texts. Nonetheless, if wisdom is to assume once again an important place in the lives of thoughtful people, empirical research will likely be vital to its revival. The Defining Wisdom project of the University of Chicago, which in 2008 will be awarding 20 young researchers substantial grants for the study of wisdom, may well prove a watershed for wisdom's resurgence. Later, the University will be offering grants to a number of senior researchers into wisdom. It seems that with Positive Psychology, and the empirical study of spirituality, love, and wellness in a holistic sense, there is a shift occurring in Western sensibilities. In philosophy, virtue ethics is concerned with practical wisdom, phronesis), and Bent Flyvbjerg (Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) has introduced a framework for phronetic social science.

2008 Defining Wisdom Grant Competition: Award Announcements

2008-09-03T14:57:00Z

DEFINING WISDOM AWARDS ANNOUNCED

Congratulations to the award winners of the Defining Wisdom grant competition. Participants were chosen because each showed the promise of a distinctive contribution to wisdom research and the potential to help establish a new and rigorous field of research on the topic of wisdom. The Project Council was truly impressed by the presentations and discussions at the Defining Wisdom Symposium which recently took place in Chicago.

In addition to project presentations and discussions, each full proposal underwent a two-stage process of peer review (external review & Council review) in which it was rated according to the Defining Wisdom Evaluation Criteria. On August 23^rd, the Council met in closed session to deliberate and choose the few who would receive research funding in this inaugural RFA.

The University of Chicago and the John Templeton Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the Defining Wisdom grant competition:

Deborah Coen
Assistant Professor, History
Columbia University, United States
Uncertain Ground: A Historical Tectonics of Wisdom

Melissa Ferguson
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Cornell University, United States
When Archimedes and King Solomon Meet: Wisdom as Intuitive Problem Solving

Judith Gluck
Professor, Psychology
Alpen-Adria-University, Austria
Wisdom and the Life Story: How Life Experiences Foster Wisdom

Jean Gordon
Associate Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
University of Iowa, United States
Wisdom in Words: The Relationship between Language Use and the Perception of Wisdom

Jeffrey Green
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Virginia Commonwealth University, United States
Wisdom as Learning from Life Experiences: Affective Forecasting for Benevolent and Selfish Behaviors

Joshua Greene
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Harvard University, United States
The Wisdom of Moral Principles

Ankur Gupta
Lecturer, Computer Science
Butler University, United States
Wisdom Is Compression: Data Compression as a Mathematical Measure of Wisdom

Ryan Hanley
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Marquette University, United States
Altruism's Wisdom

Matthew Jones
Associate Professor, History
Columbia University, United States
Formalism and Its Discontents: Mathematics and Wisdom in the European Enlightenment

Lauris Kaldjian
Associate Professor, Medicine
University of Iowa, Carver College of Medicine, United States
Wisdom, Ethics, and the Medical Professional

Ute Kunzmann
Professor, Psychology
Leipzig University, Germany
Wisdom-Related Knowledge and Behavior during Social Conflict

Michael Legaspi
Assistant Professor, Theology
Creighton University, United States
Wisdom as Skillful Interpretation: Scriptural Appropriation and the Hermeneutics of Recovery

Heidi Levitt
Associate Professor, Psychology
University of Memphis, United States
Principles Toward the Development of Professional Wisdom

Randall McNeill
Associate Professor, Classics
Lawrence University, United States
The Price of Wisdom: Community and the Individual in Greek and Roman Poetry

Seana Moran
Research Fellow, Stanford Center on Adolescence
Stanford University, United States
All the Wiser: Wisdom from a System Dynamics Perspective

Shabnam Mousavi
Visiting Research Scientist, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany
Practical Wisdom as Heuristic Processes

Sendhil Mullainathan
Professor, Economics
Harvard University, United States
Wise Choices: The Interaction of Individual and Institutional Wisdom

Eddy Nahmias
Associate Professor, Philosophy, Neuroscience
Georgia State University, United States
Free Will and Wisdom in the Age of the Mind Sciences

John Pfaff
Associate Professor, Law
Fordham University, United States
Incorporating Systematic Sources of Knowledge into the Social Sciences and the Law

Michael Sargent
Associate Professor, Psychology
Bates College, United States
D*A*R*IA: Testing Model of Principled Reasoning

Valerie Tiberius
Associate Professor, Philosophy
University of Minnesota, United States
The Psychological Foundations of Reflective Wisdom

Neil Tsutsui
Assistant Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management
University of California Berkeley, United States
The Wisdom of the Ant: The Role of Experience in Sociality and Aggression

Keith Whitaker
Adjunct Asst. Professor, Center on Wealth and Philanthropy
Boston College, United States
Wisdom at Work: An Inquiry into Wealth Counseling as a Form of Practical Wisdom

"Templeton Foundation, U. of C. make wise funding decision" by Charles Storch, Chicago Tribune reporter, August 21, 2008

2008-08-25T20:54:00Z

GRANTS AND GIVING

Templeton Foundation, U. of C. make wise funding decision

By Charles Storch

Chicago Tribune reporter

August 21, 2008

The wisdom of the ages could use freshening up.

That's the thinking at the John Templeton Foundation, which has teamed with the University of Chicago to see whether there are any bright new ideas about wisdom. They have invited 40 predominantly young scholars from around the world here for the next few days to present research proposals and compete for Templeton grants worth around $100,000 over two years.

This is not some fuzzy-headed exercise, said U. of C. psychology professor John Cacioppo, one of this project's principals.

"We're trying to develop a science of wisdom," he said. "We want to create a network of scholars across disciplines to help us bring this abstract concept under the lens of science."

The Templeton Foundation, founded by the late investor and philanthropist John Templeton, is known for handing out rich prizes and seeking answers to big ideas, whether they be about faith, science, human purpose, even unconditional love. Its exploration of wisdom is new, said Barnaby Marsh, the Philadelphia-area philanthropy's director of strategic initiatives.

Marsh observed that "a lot of the definitions of wisdom today are grounded in ancient writings, but are they relevant today? We need a new viewing of wisdom in the 21st Century."

For example, he asked, is wisdom more than the understanding and judgment that comes from knowledge and experience? Does it also require the humility of knowing one's areas of ignorance? Can wisdom be measured or taught?

Templeton is giving the U. of C. $2.96 million over three years to explore these and other notions; of that amount, $2 million will go to some 20 deep thinkers deemed to have the worthier research topics.

Last year, the school issued a worldwide call for proposals, limiting the field to experts who had received their "terminal" degree (PhD, MD, JD, etc.) no later than 1997.

"We thought we would start with young scholars in hopes of getting cutting-edge approaches," said Cacioppo.

He said he was stunned when 631 proposals were submitted. The submissions underwent a peer review by experts around the world and then by an 11-member council, which includes Cacioppo, other U. of C. faculty and Marsh. In January, the field was narrowed to 40. They are expected here Thursday and Friday for a "wisdom symposium" at U. of C.'s Gleacher Center downtown.

The council will hear their presentations Friday, then adjourn Saturday to pick 20 grant recipients. The selection probably will be announced about a week later.

The grant's main requirement is that the recipients reconvene annually over the next two years. Cacioppo expects a book to be produced from these studies. Marsh believes Templeton has made a wise investment in teaming with U. of C. Templeton is giving the school more than $4 million over three years for a similar exploration—of virtue.

Grants: The Department of Veteran Affairs is giving $3 million to a joint effort by Loyola University Chicago's Niehoff School of Nursing and Hines VA Hospital to help ease a critical shortage of nurses within the VA system and the Chicago area.

The Sisters of Mercy, Regional Community of Chicago, added $500,000 to the $1 million it previously gave to St. Xavier University's endowment campaign, which raised $2.5 million. The Chicago school also is to receive nearly $2 million over five years from the Education Department for a program to increase student engagement in learning.

Kraft Foods is giving $100,000 for large commercial coolers and freezers for Northern Illinois Food Bank and the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

People:Janet Fregulia is the new executive director of Moose Charities Inc. Succeeding her as chief executive of Women of the Moose is Barbara McPherson. ... Jennifer Strait joined Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation as program officer. ... Youth Job Center of Evanston elected as its board president James Kauffman.

cstorch@tribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-giving-0821aug21,0,7795545.story

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection is out

2008-08-13T16:02:00Z

John Cacioppo and William Patrick have released a new book on Cacioppo's work over the past 30 years entitled Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. Visit their website www.scienceofloneliness.com for more information.

Feeling cut off from others now and then is part of the human condition. By exploring this seemingly commonplace experience, John Cacioppo’s pioneering research gives us a fundamentally new way of understanding human nature and ourselves. His sophisticated studies relying on brain imaging, analysis of blood pressure, immune response, stress hormones, behavior, and even gene expression, show that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent—physiologically as well as psychologically—than our cultural assumptions have ever allowed us to acknowledge.

Bringing urgency to the message, Cacioppo’s findings also show that prolonged loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking or obesity. On the flip side, they demonstrate the therapeutic power of social connection, and point the way toward making that healing balm available to everyone.

Cacioppo has worked with science writer William Patrick to trace the evolution of these tandem forces, showing how for our primitive ancestors, survival depended not on greater brawn, but on greater commitments to and from each other. Serving as a prompt to repair frayed social bonds, the pain of loneliness engendered a fear response so powerfully disruptive that even now, millions of years later, a persistent sense of rejection or isolation can impair DNA transcription in our immune cells. This disruption also impairs thinking, will power, and perseverance, as well as our ability to read social signals and exercise social skills. It also limits our ability to internally regulate our emotions—all of which can combine to trap us in self-defeating behaviors that reinforce the very isolation and rejection that we dread.

Loneliness shows each of us how to overcome this feedback loop of defensive behaviors to achieve better health and greater happiness. For society, the potential pay off is the greater prosperity and social cohesion that follows from increased social trust.

Ultimately, Loneliness demonstrates the irrationality of our culture’s intense focus on competition and individualism at the expense of family and community. It makes the case that the unit of one is actually an inadequate measure, even when it comes to the health and well being of the individual.

John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and past President of the Association for Psychological Science. He lives in Chicago. William Patrick, formerly the science editor at Harvard University Press, is editor in chief of The Journal of Life Sciences. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

What Others Are Saying About Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

“This wise, beautifully written, and often funny book brings the underlying science of social ties to life. It is a tour de force on one of the most significant known influences on human health.” —Shelley E. Taylor, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Tending Instinct: Women, Men, and the Biology of Relationships.

“Both heartbreaking and illuminating, this fascinating book describes what psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered about our fundamental need to belong to others and the dire consequences of belonging only to ourselves. A masterful blend of biological and social science, Loneliness is one of the most important books about the human condition to appear in a decade.” —Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, Harvard University, and author of Stumbling on Happiness

“Just as hunger prevents us from starving and pain causes us to retreat from physical danger, the authors help us see that loneliness is a symptom of our basic need to connect. . . . This fascinating, complex, and yet highly accessible exploration reminds us that humans are inherently social creatures and that no child or adult can develop properly in the absence of strong social bonds.” —Melinda Blau, coauthor of Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer for Toddlers, and The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems

“Based on years of research, this magnificent exposé discusses the loneliness many people feel, advising them to reach out to others. Our species naturally reciprocates social gestures.” —Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape

“I never imagined that one book could explain so much about human nature. And yet this scientific exploration does not diminish us. Instead, it exalts our simple humanity. Loneliness is a beautiful message of human connection and a beautiful book.” —Sidney Poitier, Academy Award–winning actor and author of The Measure of a Man

"After reading this book you'll never want to be lonely again -- nor will you have to be." Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, C. S. and D. J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University, and author of Flow

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

2008-05-22T13:10:00Z

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

The New York Times

By SARA REISTAD-LONG

Published: May 20, 2008

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.

“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=older+brain+&st=nyt&oref=slogin

The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis

2008-05-13T16:31:00Z

The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis

The New York Times

By STEPHEN S. HALL

Published: May 6, 2007

In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved enough “ego integrity” over the course of a lifetime, then the imminent approach of infirmity and death would be accompanied by the virtue of wisdom. Unfortunately for researchers who followed, Erikson didn’t bother to define wisdom.

As an ancient concept and esteemed human value, wisdom has historically been studied in the realms of philosophy and religion. The idea has been around at least since the Sumerians first etched bits of practical advice — “We are doomed to die; let us spend” — on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago. But as a trait that might be captured by quantitative measures, it has been more like the woolly mammoth of ideas — big, shaggy and elusive. It is only in the last three decades that wisdom has received even glancing attention from social scientists. Erikson’s observations left the door open for the formal study of wisdom, and a few brave psychologists rushed in where others feared to tread.

In some respects, they have not moved far beyond the very first question about wisdom: What is it? And it won’t give anything away to reveal that 30 years after embarking on the empirical study of wisdom, psychologists still don’t agree on an answer. But it is also true that the journey in many ways may be as enlightening as the destination.

From the outset, it’s easier to define what wisdom isn’t. First of all, it isn’t necessarily or intrinsically a product of old age, although reaching an advanced age increases the odds of acquiring the kinds of life experiences and emotional maturity that cultivate wisdom, which is why aspects of wisdom are increasingly attracting the attention of gerontological psychologists. Second, if you think you’re wise, you’re probably not. As Gandhi (who topped the leader board a few years ago in a survey in which college students were asked to name wise people) put it, “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.” Indeed, a general thread running through modern wisdom research is that wise people tend to be humble and “other-centered” as opposed to self-centered.

“Wisdom is really hard to study — really hard,” says Robert J. Sternberg, a former president of the American Psychological Association who edited “Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins and Development,” one of the first academic books on the subject, in 1990, and also edited, with Jennifer Jordan, “A Handbook of Wisdom” in 2005. “People tend to pooh-pooh wisdom because, well, you know, what’s that? And how could you possibly define it? Isn’t it culturally relative?” And yet Sternberg, who is the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, says he believes the cultivation of wisdom — even though the concept is “big, important and messy” — is essential to the future of society.

Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential.

If you think all those attributes sound fuzzy, vague and absolutely refractory to quantification, you’ve got a lot of company in the academic community. But there is a delicious paradox at the heart of the study of wisdom. As difficult as it is to define, the mere contemplation of a definition is an irresistible exercise that says a lot about who we aspire to become over the course of a lifetime and what we value as a society. And little pieces of that evolving definition of wisdom — especially the ability to cope with adversity and the regulation of emotion with age — have begun to attract researchers with brain-scanning machines and serious chops in neuroscience.

“It’s very intriguing, and it’s becoming a big issue in our field,” says Suzanne Kunkel, director of the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio. She noted that the number of formal talks about wisdom and the aging process has increased significantly at professional meetings. “Part of me is a little skeptical,” she says, reflecting the compelling ambivalence the subject elicits, “and part of me thinks there’s something there.”

For full article, visit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/magazine/06Wisdom-t.html?pagewanted=1

The Wisdom Page Podcasts, Copthorne (Cop) Macdonald and Others Discuss Wisdom

2008-04-17T20:46:00Z

Since 1995, THE WISDOM PAGE (now at www.wisdompage.com) has made wisdom-related resources available to the Internet community: information about the nature of wisdom and how it can be developed, various on-line texts concerning wisdom, references to books about wisdom, information about organizations that promote wisdom, wise activities, listserv groups concerned with aspects of wisdom, and streaming audio and video presentations related to wisdom. THE WISDOM PAGE PODCAST is the latest effort to serve the informational needs of wisdom-interested people worldwide. Individual podcast episodes by WISDOM PAGE founder Copthorne (Cop) Macdonald and others focus on issues related to the development of personal wisdom and the introduction of wise values into societal institutions. All audio episodes are in 32 kbps MP3 format that works well with either a hi-speed or a good quality 56K dialup connection.

Visit: http://www.wisdompage.com/TheWisdomPagePodcast.html

AEPL 2008 Summer Conference: Reclaiming the Wisdom Tradition for Education

2008-04-03T16:41:00Z

May 29 - June 1, 2008 in Monterey Bay, California

Since the Enlightenment, public systems of education have tended to focus on the efficient transmission of acquired knowledge. Consequently, the deeper aim of education—the evocation of wisdom in the human person—has suffered a temporary eclipse.

Wisdom is personal and compassionate. It is not content to exist within the defined, secure borders of knowledge, which limits itself to proofs and facts. It seeks access to the farther reaches of consciousness where hard lines dissolve, where minds grow and meet, hearts reach out, and the self and the universe begin to converge.

These times in which wisdom is so conspicuously lacking may well be ripe for re-centering people’s understanding of the most basic aims of our educational endeavors: for reclaiming the spiritual, humanistic, and philosophical heart of education, and for bringing the findings of science to bear on the expansion of consciousness and the deepening of communication. With these aims in mind, this conference has been designed to consider and further the possibility of broad-based, wisdom-centered education.

For more information, please visit: http://www.aepl.org