MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing.
Diary of a WIMP at middle age Fifty years ago, the word "computer" had a very different meaning. Prior to World War II, the word referred not to machines, but to people (mostly women in order to save costs) hired as human calculators.
If we had the technology to rewire our brains to help remember certain things and forget others, it could help millions of people struggling with neurological conditions, from Alzheimer's to post-traumatic stress disorder. But it also raises the frightening possibility - depicted over and over again in sci-fi - that someone would be able to use such technology to mess with people's minds without their consent.
Over most of the past century, researchers have been trying to determine whether there's any link between religion and intelligence.
On Monday, the National Institutes of Health released a fifty-eight-page report on the future of neuroscience-the first substantive step in developing President Obama's BRAIN Initiative, which seeks to "revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury."
"You're looking for three things, generally, in a person," says Warren Buffett. "Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don't have the last one, don't even bother with the first two." Ideally you want all three but people don't always cooperate. These qualities tend to be difficult to judge in hiring someone.
How do people recognize good web design? There is a big difference between good and bad design. Many people can identify a good design, but they don't know what makes the difference. Most people are not looking at a website and thinking: That website has well-matched serif and sans-serif fonts and a nice usage of white space!
Francis Csedrik, who is 8 and lives in Washington, D.C., remembers a lot of events from when he was 4 or just a bit younger. There was the time he fell "headfirst on a marble floor" and got a concussion, the day someone stole the family car ("my dad had to chase it down the block"), or the morning he found a black bat (the furry kind) in the house.
You would think that rewarding people for being good at their jobs would make them better at them. But social shows that it doesn't, for a number of reasons. The go-to cliché for motivation is the carrot and the stick, with the carrot being the sweet and the stick the thwapping punishment.
Mikael Cho is the co-founder of ooomf, a network that connects short-term software projects with handpicked developers and designers. Mikael writes about psychology, startups, and product marketing over on the ooomf blog. I've noticed how seemingly small things like font and the spacing between letters can impact how I feel when reading online.
Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to.
by Maria Popova How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love. "If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve," Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: "Do what you love, and don't stop until you get what you love.
Logos are an essential part of a brand's identity. A great logo encapsulates the personality and promise of the business behind it. Some of the world's most ubiquitous logos had humble beginnings. In 1975, Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 to develop the Nike logo and the "Swoosh" we've come to recognize has remained more or less intact for nearly forty years.
On March 8, the New York Times unveiled a new app called NYT Now that signals a major shift in how publishers package the news.
Narrator: In music, one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord - and that's the end!
People who come of age during a recession are less likely to be narcissists later in life. The humbling experience of struggling through a down economy as a young adult seems to leave its mark.
Less FaceTime, more face-to-face time. Tallulah Wilson was just 15 years old when she took her own life back in October 2012. The gifted ballerina had been receiving treatment for clinical depression, but whilst creating an online fantasy of a cocaine-taking character, she began to share self-harm images on social networking site, Tumblr.
There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology. We celebrate and honor people for their creativity, identifying eminent individuals, as well as entire cultures and societies, in terms of their creative achievements.
There are few things that can galvanize the news world's attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson's ouster yesterday afternoon probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter's GDP numbers. We don't typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan's very capable cadre of media reporters.
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In 1959, an American researcher named Ted Sterling reported something disturbing. Of 294 articles published across four major psychology journals, 286 had reported positive results - that is, a staggering 97% of published papers were underpinned by statistically significant effects. Where, he wondered, were all the negative results - the less exciting or less conclusive findings?
In our increasingly connected world, one thing has become ever clearer to everyone who possesses a device that allows them to connect to the greatest communication network the world has ever seen: There are some people out there with some really stupid arguments.
It's a given that the world of pop psychology contains spadefuls of pseudoscience, but as soon as you start reading Michael Gordin's compelling new book, The Pseudoscience Wars, you realise you don't quite know what that word means.
Search YouTube for "baby" and "iPad" and you'll find clips featuring one-year-olds attempting to manipulate magazine pages and television screens as though they were touch-sensitive displays. These children are one step away from assuming that such technology is a natural, spontaneous part of the material world.
Our brains are busier than ever before. We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more.
