How We "Remember" Things That Never Happened "There are two distinct types of memory: Verbatim, which allows us to recall what specifically happened at any given moment, and gist, which enables us to put the event in context and give it meaning." A new study has surprised researchers with the finding that "verbatim and gist memory are separate, parallel systems. So separate, in fact, that 'there is some evidence' they occupy different sections of the brain."

Miller-McCune 05/08/08

email this story | Posted 05/08/08@07:13PM

Are Wine Buyers Stupid? (The Study Says...) "In recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop culture's punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money."

The New York Times 05/07/08

email this story | Posted 05/08/08@07:11PM

A Classless Society? Sorry - It's Not In Our Genes A new study reports that hierarchical awareness seems to be deeply embedded in the human brain. "If the hierarchy is stable, we seem to ignore those below us but focus on those higher up. If unstable, and we are in danger of losing status, areas of the brain linked to emotions are aroused."

ScienceNow 04/23/08

email this story | Posted 05/07/08@05:02PM

Why Our Brains Work Against Our Best Interests "Why are we as a species so often so desperately poor at achieving our goals? If we are, as the selfish-gene theory would have it, organisms that exist only to serve the interests of our genes, why do we waste so much of our time doing things that are not, in any obvious way, remotely in the interest of our genes?"

Los Angeles Times 05/04/08

email this story | Posted 05/06/08@03:00PM

In Nature - Smarter Isn't Better Scientists "are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal's health."

The New York Times 05/06/08

email this story | Posted 05/06/08@06:07AM

Boomers Focus On Brain Exercise (What You Can Do) "There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects. Every time you challenge your brain it will actually modify the brain. We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it's impossible."

The New York Times 05/03/08

email this story | Posted 05/04/08@11:11AM

How To Remember Everything "SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information."

Wired 04/21/08

email this story | Posted 05/04/08@10:54AM

Our Wired World - Can This Really Be Good For Culture? "As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests - whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography - they create a fragmented world of 'echo chambers' isolated from the public space in which a healthy democracy thrives."

Times Literary Supplement 05/02/08

email this story | Posted 05/04/08@10:36AM

Copyright? That's So Yesterday. How About User-Right? "We're seeing the move from the sort of static idea of a copy that gets paid a certain rate to a revenue share and to a usage right which means that I am authorizing agents to give the license for the use of the music, like I always have in the past, for example with radio. I just want to collect a piece of the revenues that the other party is making rather than preventing any kind of copy."

NewMusicBox 05/01/08

email this story | Posted 05/01/08@06:02PM

What's So Creative When Everybody's "Creative"? "Businesses hold creative-thinking seminars, universities teach creative writing, ministers makes speeches puffing our 'creative industries'. Even the splodges and squiggles that children daub in primary school are deemed creative. One could even say that the idea of creativity has become thoroughly debased."

The Telegraph (UK) 04/30/08

email this story | Posted 04/30/08@06:18PM

Finally: Software That Can Make You Smarter Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."

Wired 04/28/08

email this story | Posted 04/28/08@07:47PM

Why Our Brains Light Up For Power And Prestige New "brain-scanning studies suggest that the link between profits and power takes place in the striatum - part of the brain involved in sensing rewards. This provides the biological basis of our everyday experience that personal reputation is felt as reward."

New Scientist 04/23/08

email this story | Posted 04/23/08@07:07PM

Why Fix It When You Can Just Build A New One? "As other cities look to replace their blighted downtowns with new development, Las Vegas, known for its extravagant facsimiles of European and American landmarks, has come up with an unusual approach: Build another downtown, right next to the decaying one."

The New York Times 04/23/08

email this story | Posted 04/23/08@05:14AM

Study: Dull Chores Numb The Brain Researchers have discovered that as people perform monotonous tasks, their brain shifts towards an at-rest mode whether they like it or not.

Discovery 04/22/08

email this story | Posted 04/22/08@09:39PM

How Language Shapes Our Perception "Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world? The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate."

The New York Times 04/22/08

email this story | Posted 04/22/08@07:16PM

Scientists Observe Mistakes In Brains Before Mistakes Are Made "Researchers observed test subjects' minds going on autopilot up to half a minute before the subjects actually made mistakes, even though the subjects weren't aware of their own lapses of attention. If the same mechanisms produce other, more meaningful errors -- slips on the assembly line or behind a steering wheel -- then the research could be used to design biofeedback systems that could catch mistakes before they're made."

Wired 04/21/08

email this story | Posted 04/22/08@06:59AM

An Artistic Bending Of The Truth "Whoever controls the image controls modern history. In today's media world, the power of the image is almost limitless. So we need those who best understand that power to police it vigorously. Which, of course, is where art comes in. Art's domain is the image, too. And if the image isn't doing what it should be doing - recording the truth - then art has a creative duty to patrol and protect that domain. We need rustlers-turned-sheriffs, hackers-turned-security chiefs. We need artists as we've never needed them before. So, has art risen to this challenge? Is it vigorously policing the world of the image? Is it hell."

The Times (UK) 04/20/08

email this story | Posted 04/21/08@06:45PM

Study: Older Americans Are Happiest Eye-opening new research finds the happiest Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests. The two go hand-in-hand: Being social can help keep away the blues.

Wired (AP) 04/19/08

email this story | Posted 04/20/08@01:41PM

Music As Social Policy? "There is little doubt that scientific research plays an important role in enhancing our quality of life and improving our future wellbeing. However, today the term 'the research shows...' is often deployed because we find it difficult to justify music or art or indeed anything cultural as true or good in its own terms. Yes, cultural entrepreneurs will sometimes rhetorically affirm that music is important in its own right - but increasingly such declarations come across as ritualistic."

spiked-online 04/14/08

email this story | Posted 04/17/08@08:03PM

Arts & Culture As "Soft Power" Actress Cate Blanchett says that her home country has "an opportunity to put creativity and the arts back into the centre of Australian life here and abroad. This is how a middle power can exercise its soft power in a positive and stimulating way -- that shows the world that we are much more than the cliched images that come readily to mind."

The Age (Melbourne) 04/16/08

email this story | Posted 04/15/08@07:42PM

Re-Engineering Your Ear For Better Bass "An ear's size is irrelevant; what matters are the properties of a shape that's intrigued humanity for millennia, inspiring ancient Greek mathematicians and Renaissance painters and anyone who's ever contemplated a nautilus shell or the center of a sunflower. As scientists better understand the cochlea, might they be able to tweak it? Could they someday make the bass on Junior Wilson's 'Dock of the Bay' remix carry my brain out of my head and across the Pacific, just like it wants to?"

Wired 04/14/08

email this story | Posted 04/15/08@08:21AM

How To Understand Computer Viruses And Spam? With Art Of Course The only manipulation involved was color-coding, setting the virtual position of the camera, and some lighting effects. The project lives somewhere between pure art and information visualization.

Wired 04/14/08

email this story | Posted 04/14/08@08:00PM

What Your Memory Could Learn From Computers Although our memories are sometimes spectacular -- we are very good at recognizing photos, for example -- our memory capacities are often disappointing.

New York Times Magazine 04/13/08

email this story | Posted 04/14/08@07:54PM

Too Much Of A Good Thing What if the problem with classical music isn't that it's elitist or stuffy, but that we're so inundated with it that we can't hope to truly appreciate or understand it fully? "It's not just music -- it's cultural effusions in general... There is an overabundance of art around, and it can't be properly digested."

Palm Beach Post 04/13/08

email this story | Posted 04/14/08@05:44AM

How CellPhones Are Changing The World "Something that's mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal -- land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars -- can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information."

New York Times Magazine 04/13/08

email this story | Posted 04/13/08@09:15PM

The Machine That Can Tell What You're Thinking "In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?"

Wired 04/13/08

email this story | Posted 04/13/08@07:21PM

What's Neuroscience Got To Do With Art? "The literary critic as neuroscience groupie is part of a growing trend. We have become accustomed over the past half-century to critics sending out to other disciplines for "theoretical frameworks" in which to place their engagement with works of literature. The results have often been dire, the work or author in question disappearing in a sea of half-comprehended or uncritically incorporated linguistics, mathematics, psychiatry, political theory, history, or whatever. Why do critics do this?"

The Times (UK) 04/13/08

email this story | Posted 04/13/08@08:47AM

Side Effect Of An Illness: Artistic Gifts Maurice Ravel apparently had "a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia," when he was composing "Bolero," but non-artists stricken with FTD may lose other abilities even as they suddenly become gifted in the arts. "The disease apparently (alters) circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity."

The New York Times 04/08/08

email this story | Posted 04/08/08@05:35AM

Beijing's Remarkable (And Rapid) Transformation "This is the new dawn chorus of Beijing - the peal of hit steel, the crump of the piston hammer, the high song of the drill... Right now, Beijing is probably the biggest building site on earth, with the possible exceptions of Shanghai and Dubai. Urban re-engineering has taken place on a greater scale, perhaps - Haussmann's Paris, Lutyens's New Delhi - but never so rapidly."

The Telegraph (UK) 04/05/08

email this story | Posted 04/06/08@06:42PM

When Did US Politicians Forget About Cities? "There are three times as many urbanites in America as country folk, yet you wouldn't know it listening to the three main presidential candidates, or perusing their Web sites... You won't hear much about aging cities on Earth fighting to keep their downtowns alive and their overcrowded commuter buses on the road. Cities just don't figure in the political imagination anymore."

Philadelphia Inquirer 04/05/08

email this story | Posted 04/06/08@07:55AM

The Night James Brown Saved Boston Riots broke out in cities around the US following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. But in Boston, one of the most racially polarized American cities, things stayed at a tense simmer, thanks in large part to the impromptu efforts of singer James Brown.

Washington Post 04/05/08

email this story | Posted 04/06/08@07:43AM

Edinburgh Going Global This year's edition of the Edinburgh International Festival will be chock full of international flavor, as "a drive to reflect both the changing face of Europe and the redrawing of borders across the globe have acted as... inspirations" for director Jonathan Mills, in his second year at the massive fest's helm.

The Scotsman (UK) 04/03/08

email this story | Posted 04/02/08@07:35PM

Learning To Love Wikipedia? "The English version of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles, and it has been translated into over 250 languages. It has become so massive that you can type virtually any noun into a search engine and the first link will be to a Wikipedia page. A generation of students was warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that it is the first place they go to start a research project..."

InsideHigherEd 04/01/08

email this story | Posted 04/01/08@09:20PM

The Myth Of Going It Alone "Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone. Until recently, social science went along with this idea. Lab-based research supposedly furnished slam-dunk evidence. Lately, however, some researchers have been dissenting from the textbook version..."

The New York Times 03/30/08

email this story | Posted 03/31/08@07:05AM

An Artist-Friendly Future Using Tech? "It's a vision of the future where people would want to dig deeper in the world of an artist and where artists would be willing to be more experimental because the payment systems would be more transparent and different than they are today. It's about artists linking together and being collaborative."

Yahoo! (Reuters) 03/29/08

email this story | Posted 03/31/08@05:53AM

Redefining The Artists' Place "Innovation isn't linear. It operates in a complex system, and that's where artists live and work. Innovation is what they do with the symbolic forms they create, and artists also have greater understanding about risk taking, about analysis and interpretation, approaching it quite differently from the way science approaches risk, for example. It's the way artists engage with curiosity that make them innovative."

The Australian 03/31/08

email this story | Posted 03/30/08@08:30AM

Danger, Your Smell Factor Just Went Up! It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

Discovery 03/27/08

email this story | Posted 03/30/08@05:10AM

The Ads That Follow Us Outside "From Connecticut to California, digital billboards are becoming an increasingly hot issue as outdoor advertising companies seek to convert existing billboards to digital and erect new ones. State and local governments are struggling with how to regulate this bold new breed."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 03/26/08

email this story | Posted 03/26/08@07:49PM

America's Suburbs - A Decline Of Civilization? "No longer young, no longer trendy, no longer the place to be, no longer without apparent limitations or constraints, these places, like people, have developed ways of avoiding reality."

Boston Review 03/08

email this story | Posted 03/25/08@05:50PM

What Is The Future When The Present Overtakes It So Quickly Arthur C. Clarke's passing "poses a challenge to the current generation of science-fiction writers: in a world where technology evolves so rapidly that the present already feels like the future, will a modern-day author ever inherit Mr. Clarke's aura of prescience? Do any of his successors share his apparent talent for envisioning technological breakthroughs before they are realized?"

The New York Times 03/25/08

email this story | Posted 03/25/08@04:38AM