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POPSCan You Become a Creature of New Habits? “The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
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POPSIntelligence and rhythmic accuracy go hand in hand “All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides,” says Fredrik Ullén.
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POPSDoes the Human Brain Possess Potential “Super Powers”? Mind expert Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney and director of Centre for the Mind, is certain that all people have these latent super abilities, but only some are able to express them through “malfunctions” of overriding brain functions.
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POPSThe evolution of drug abuse "All this shows “our ancestors were regularly exposed to plant neurotoxins,” they added, so the view of our brains as unsuspecting victims of the new chemical threat is untenable. " " One possibility, the scientists suggested, is that animals co-opted some plant toxins and used them for their own defenses against parasites. If this is true, then evolution, the process by which species adapt and change to meet environmental demands, might have designed our brains to encourage some drug use. This could involve shaping our brains to associate drug intake with feelings of reward."
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POPSArtificial Intelligence and Society We act like our tiny little corner of mindspace is the whole universe. We think of the scale of intelligence as if it ran from a village idiot to Einstein, rather than running from an amoeba up to humans. On the scale of interspecies differences of intelligence–if you are comparing yourself to a mouse–then the distance between a village idiot and Einstein fits onto a small dot. You might be able to tell the difference between a village idiot and an Einstein, but a chimpanzee would have a bit of trouble administering the IQ test.
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POPSVirtuality and reality 'to merge' "In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality." He added: "Games are the cutting edge of what is happening - we are going to spend more of our time in virtual reality environments. "Fully emergent games is really where we want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions." "Play is how we principally learn and principally create," he said.
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POPSYour Political Preferences Might be Hard-Wired However this expresses the naivety of many people, who believe that they were “hardcore” anything. The simple fact is that people’s opinions change as they mature and acquire more information. It doesn’t reflect this evidence, rather than focusing us on the reality behind it; that it is down to personality traits.