I just came back from a jazz festival at Katy High School in Texas that show-cased student stage bands from ten schools mostly near Houston, but some as far away as Beaumont and Brownsville (the latter band stole the show). The festival was also a teaching event, with each band or ensemble...

The problem isn’t in failing, it’s the mindset. Mindset is changeable, and by changing one mindset, one will be able to ratchet up his success faster than he ever thought possible.   Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford, has spent her life studying the two learning mindsets:...

Ceaseless Reinvention Leads To Overlapping Solutions   David M. Eagleman, a Neuroscientist, Baylor College of Medicine; Author, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the… For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for...

In his new book, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues that we’re thinking about worldchanging innovation all wrong: It’s not going to come from where we expect it. Bottom-Up Solutions To Top-Down Problems => Deductive Reasoning to Solve How We Perceive the World   The world is currently...

Jonah Lehrer, in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, tells the story of how a handful of iconic creators each discovered an essential truth about the mind long before modern science was able to label and pinpoint it, makes a case for the extraordinary importance of the cross-pollination of...

It has been often said that it is only by gaining a true understanding of the past that we can ever hope to find the vital key to understanding its future and in turn, our own. The reality is that our distant history is still an enormous riddle. We only know what we do from the gradual piecing...

One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley was a class on cognitive science from the famed linguist George Lakoff. The course was essentially just us reading through his classic book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind...

Nathan Myhrvold, CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine   Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world...

There is something to be said for letting go of the mantle of expert, argues Peter Fiske.   In science, intellect and intelligence are valued above all else. Scientists spend years in graduate programmes, studying, teaching and researching, to become experts in their fields. Having...

What’s the Big Idea? Are you in a rut? Instead of changing what you do, try changing how you think about it, says Roger Martin, a strategic advisor to global businesses and Dean of the Rotman School of Management. In 2000, growth at Proctor & Gamble had slowed to almost zero, and the...

Think Again! As quoted by Jaron Lanier, here’s one problem with collective intelligence: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things....

Adrian Kreye, an Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich points out that free jazz is a perfect way to improve our cognitive toolkits. It’s always worth to take a few cues from mid-20th-century avant-garde. It is a highly...

Dr. Clifford A. Pickover, Yale-educated scientist, futurist, inventor (over 40 patents), astonishingly prolific author of mind-expanding books (over 40 books) and mathematical puzzles, traveler to the extreme borderlands of science, promoter of strangely-wonderful sites and people all over the...

Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK, and an advocate of open research, suggests that within scientific circles there is a lot of chatter about “openness”. As the reach of the web grows ever wider, scientists face increasing...

Sam Harris, a Neuroscientist; Chairman, Project Reason; Author, The Moral Landscape, invites you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by...

Brian Knutson, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University Since different visiting teachers had promoted contradictory philosophies, the villagers asked the Buddha whom they should believe. The Buddha advised: “When you know for yourselves … these...

Victoria Stodden, a Computational Legal Scholar; Assistant Professor of Statistics, Columbia University Physicists created the term “phase transition” to describe a change of state in a physical system, such as liquid to gas. The concept has since been applied in a variety of...

David Rowan, an Editor, WIRED magazine’s UK Edition From the dawn of civilisation until 2003, Eric Schmidt is fond of saying, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days — and the pace is accelerating. In our post-privacy world of pervasive...

In professional wrestling, kayfabe (pronounced /ˈkeɪfeɪb/) is the portrayal of events within the industry as “real”. That is, the portrayal of professional wrestling as being genuine or not worked. Eric Weinstein – Mathematician and Economist (PhD Mathematics at Harvard)...

Stephon H. Alexander, a Associate Professor of Physics, Haverford College In physics one of the most beautiful yet underappreciated ideas is that of duality. A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives; often a flash of creative insight is needed to...

Gregory Cochran, a Consultant, Adaptive Optics; Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor, The 10,000 Year Explosion There’s an invidious rhetorical strategy that we’ve all seen — and I’m afraid that most of us have inflicted it on others as well. I...

I feel completely different person since the last two years. My perspective to the world and humanity shifted and gradually became bottom-up process, which I realize lately, and had very good impacts in my life. The stream of information, cognitive toolkits, and knowledge are easy to be...

Tor Nørretranders, a Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The Generous Man and The User Illusion  Depth is what you do not see immediately at the surface of things. Depth is what is below that surface: a body of water below the surface of a lake, the rich life of a soil...

Laurence C. Smith, a Professor of Geography and Earth & Space Sciences, UCLA, Author: The World in 1050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future As scientists, we’re sympathetic to this question. We’ve asked it of ourselves before, many times, after fruitless...

Roger Highfield, an Editor, New Scientist; Coauthor, After Dolly  Everyone is familiar with the struggle for existence. In the wake of the revolutionary work by Charles Darwin we realized that competition is at the very heart of evolution. The fittest win this endless “struggle for life...

Marcelo Gleiser,  a Physicist; Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World points that to improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit, the required scientific concept has to be applicable to...

Gerald Smallberg, MD, a Practicing Neurologist, New York City; Playwright, Off-Off Broadway Productions, Charter Members; The Gold Ring The exponential explosion of information and our ability to access it make our ability to validate its truthfulness not only more important but also more...

Kai Krause, a software Pioneer, Interface Designer, Author, I Think, There 4 am? shares how he’s “building a cognitive toolset” and the pure joy of discovery, reading voraciously and — quite out of sync with friends and school — he devoured encyclopedias, philosophy,...

Christine Finn an Archaeologist, Journalist; Author, Artifacts I first heard the words “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” as a first-year archaeology undergraduate. I now know it was part of Carl Sagan‘s retort against evidence from ignorance, but at the time...

John McWhorter, a Linguist; Cultural Commentator; William Simon Fellow, Colmbia; Author, That Being Said In an ideal world all people would spontaneously understand that what political scientists call path dependence explains much more of how the world works than is apparent. Path dependence...

Humanity’s cognitive toolkit would greatly benefit from adoption of “interbeing,” a concept that comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his words: “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a...

Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Co-author of Doing Race: 21 essays for the 21st century – Alana Carter is a science writer, cultural psychologist, and museum curator, The Tech Museum, San Jose, Calif. Pundits now invoke...

Fiery Cushman, a Post-doctoral fellow, Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, Harvard University We are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behavior. The explanations that we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete. Yet, that is not how it feels....

David Eagleman, a Neuroscientist, Baylor College of Medicine; Author, Incognito and Sum In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on...

Joan Chiao, an Assistant Professor, Brain, Behavior, and Cognition; Social Psychology; Northwestern University At every level in the vast and dynamic world of living things lies diversity. From biomes to biomarkers, the complex array of solutions to the most basic problems regarding survival...

Max Tegmark, a Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute thinks the scientific concept that would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit the most is “scientific concept“. Despite spectacular success in research, our...

W. Tecumseh Fitch, Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture. Many psychologists, linguists and social scientists, along with...

Anthony Aguirre, an Associate Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz Paradoxes arise when one or more convincing truths contradiction either each other, clash with other convincing truths, or violate unshakeable intuitions. They are frustrating, yet beguiling. Many see...

P.Z. Myers, a Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula As someone who just spent a term teaching freshman introductory biology, and will be doing it again in the coming months, I have to say that the first thing that leapt to my mind as an essential skill everyone should have...

Sue Blackmore, a Psychologist; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction The phrase “correlation is not a cause” (CINAC) may be familiar to every scientist but has not found its way into everyday language, even though critical thinking and scientific understanding would improve if...