People usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world   So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation?...

Curators: not just for museums anymore? “The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the rolling plenitude of information. It’s the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational...

Researchers probe the neuroscience of creativity, seeing fMRI evidence that our notion of the “divided brain” is indeed mistaken   Painters, designers, architects and other creative individuals are typically thought of as “right-brained.” But a new study from the University of...

Placebo treatments can be effective in treating some conditions by the “self-healing” capabilities of the brain   There’s good evidence showing expectations to get better have significant effects on how patients suffering a variety of ailments feel. This is called the placebo effect...

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...

A familiar scent triggers childhood memories for our brain columnist, prompting him to wonder what is going on in his head   The toy cupboard at my grandmother’s house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it....

In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance   Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting...

The human mind has been long concerned about the existence of other parallel worlds. While many people still consider it nothing more than a weird scientific fantasy, a certain number of scientists nowadays not only are ready to take this hypothesis seriously but also find evidence in favour...

Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think...

“Do you think we should get our brains scanned before getting married?”   It’s not an outrageous question.  It’s the kind of questions that will help us to learn more about how our minds act in the world, while still keeping the world in mind. Technology and science have now...

To be a writer is, in effect, to be an editor as well. This is true whether you are the sort of writer who throws on the page everything that runs through your mind and later carves it into shape, or the sort that fashions and perfects every sentence before moving on to the next. It does not...

What clues to the way we live today will archaeologists unearth in the millennia to come? What will endure, and what will fade away?   When humans in the far future are piecing together a picture of the primitive civilisation of 2012, archaeology will surely be the best way to go about...

Location Tägermoos between Steckborn and Hörhausen. The crop circle in this photo is already 15 days old. For visitors the owner made additional paths which disfigure the image somewhat. The shape is just simple, but more than a few circles. It reminds of the double helix of DNA. Aerial shot...

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...

If climate change continues along the business-as-usual path, the 24th century’s new world will be in some ways more like the world of Ancient Greece – with what’s left of the world’s inhabitants trading around a single sea. For the Ancient Greeks, it was the Mediterranean Sea. For...

New research reveals more clues as to why our ginger brethren seem, well, just a little bit different. Specifically, redheads appear to feel pain differently. While redheads are more sensitive to the cold, they appear to have a higher pain threshold than the rest of us. A recent study showed...

The more optimistic we are about the future of our species the better we can focus on today’s challenges In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we’re only getting started. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our...

On the emotional scaffolding of the self, or how the dynamics of temperament fluctuate with social context   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our...

Stopping the internet isn’t impossible, but it’s unlikely any time soon   In a statement posted online last month, hacker collective Anonymous announced plans to shut down the internet. Yes, you read that right. Operation Global Blackout, planned for March 31, is apparently a protest...

IN A CULTURE that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the...

The brain mechanisms of consciousness are being unravelled at a startling pace, with researchers focusing on eight key areas   Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious feature of our existence. A new science of consciousness is now revealing its biological...

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...

Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly, studies suggest Higher social classes more likely to lie, cheat, cut up other road users and not stop at pedestrian crossings, say researchers. A raft of studies into unethical behaviour across the social classes has delivered a withering...

Living alone doesn’t mean being lonely   “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ” by Eric Klinenberg “Going Solo” examines a dramatic demographic trend: the startling increase in adults living alone. Along the way, the book navigates some...

“The essence of chaos … simply deals with predictability in complex systems. The shorthand is the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” – Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park   I first heard...

Does exercise keep your brain running?   Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and...

Piotr Czerski is a Polish writer and commentator. Here, he lays out the kind of political/literary manifesto that seems to pop up from time to time, usually in Europe. The essay, as translated by Marta Szreder, was posted to Pastebin under a Creative Commons license. I repost it here with the...

Cancer is a disease of the body’s cells that affects around half of all Australians by the age of 85. Normally cells grow and multiply in a controlled way. But if something causes a mistake to occur in the cells’ genetic blueprints, this control can be lost. There are a number of...

Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence.   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet...

If crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they ought to exist in the dimension of time too, says Nobel prize-winning physicist   One of the most powerful ideas in modern physics is that the Universe is governed by symmetry. This is the idea that certain properties of a system do not...

The past is another country — but an alternate history is a whole new world. The best alternate histories can make you see the real history of our world in a whole new way, and make you realize that events that seem like they were inevitable… may not have been. But an alternate history...

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In...

We’re often blind to the not-so-wonderful traits we possess—but quick to point them out in others   Has someone said you’re acting like a jerk (or worse) in social situations?   Here are 6 reasons why you may have earned this title: 1.  You only talk about yourself....

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it would...

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...

What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like, for example: prayer does not physically heal anyone (or else makes things worse for the patient being prayed for), homeopathy’s only effect is to pay a charlatan, and “Mother” Earth is finding smarter ways...

Sherlock Holmes’s technique is so elusive not only because it relies on observational mastery that most of us do not possess but in that it also manages to both cast off and exploit one of the most common reasoning fallacies that we are prone to committing: the conjunction fallacy, whereby...

Empathy, a concept originally introduced as Einfühlung by Theodore Lipps, is a state that allows us to share in the experiences and mental states of others. It lets us understand–or at least begin to approximate–their feelings, their internal conditions, their possible thoughts and...

Contextual nature of memory   Our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving. In other words, we recall information better in the same environment as we stored it–or, in my case, the same environment that triggered the connection–to...

Your daily cup of coffee may be doing more for you than providing that early-morning pick-me-up. The health impact of coffee has long been a controversial topic, with advocates touting its antioxidant activity and brain-boosting ability, and detractors detailing downsides such as insomnia,...