Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?
Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted.
At seventeen, Chris began making occasional trips to Las Vegas. From a fifty-two-card deck, 2,598,960 five-card hands are possible. The basis for most poker strategy is a ruthless notion: what can I discern about my opponent’s habits that I can attack? Such an approach is called “maximally exploitive.” It is the way nearly all professionals proceed. While he was still a student, Ferguson decided also to employ a method called “optimal strategy.” It means, when up against an expert opponent, “How do I lose the least?
Jonah Lerher, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has a piece in the New Yorker this week (not online1) about how the process of insight works in the brain. The main takeaway is that insight comes easiest when our brains are relaxed and not focused on too much detail so that it is able to look for more general associations between seemingly disparate ideas.
Lisi believed that he had discovered what physicists call a Theory of Everything—a unifying idea that aims to incorporate all the universe’s forces in a single mathematical framework. Within four months, Lee Smolin, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, said that Lisi had “one of the most compelling unification models” he had seen in years. Discusses the persistent legend of the hermit genius in physics, from David Deutsch to Albert Einstein. Lisi got his Ph.D from the University of California at San Diego and, at thirty-one, dropped out of academia.
Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience.
In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
But to what extent are we—our experiences, our reactions—shaped, predetermined, by our brains, and to what extent do we shape our own brains? Does the mind run the brain or the brain the mind—or, rather, to what extent does one run the other? To what extent are we the authors, the creators, of our own experiences? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness can cast an unexpected light on this. To become blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one’s world, when the old way has been destroyed.
According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation. Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler.
In string theory, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Is that really all we need to know?
Flew’s “conversion,” first reported in late 2004, has cast him into culture wars that he contentedly avoided his whole life. Although Flew still rejects Christianity, saying only that he now believes in “an intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world,” evangelicals are understandably excited. For them, Flew has become very useful, very quickly.
What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.
Article by Oliver Sacks about a man who had amnesia and could not remember more then five minutes of the past, yet was able to still play music. His lack of memory was more haunting then the connection with music.
An article in the New Yorker about the physical and psychological torture the CIA is putting 'terrorists' through.
An article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker about people who have had near death experiences and found new inspiration in experiences.
New lie detectors using the fMRI machines are being debated.
