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POPSMind Reading Is Now Possible "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.
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POPSCulture influences brain function “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training,”
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POPSEinstein, Newton displayed autistic traits "Psychiatry tends to focus almost exclusively on the negative side of different forms of mental illness," Fitzgerald said in statement. "I want to show that psychiatric disorders can also have positive dimensions."
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POPSYour brain lies to you This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
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POPSWeird water Discovery challenges long-held beliefs about water's special properties
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POPSThe Great Silence His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.
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POPSLab Freaks Gone Wild? “What was once only science fiction is now becoming a reality, and we need to ensure that experimentation and subsequent ramifications do not outpace ethical discussion and societal decisions.
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POPSLaws of Nature, Source Unknown The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe. Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. “Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist.
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POPSThe Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You Despite its many flaws, I’m a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization—writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it—makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe.
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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