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At least since Dr. Spock, child-care gurus have increasingly advised against spanking.175 Today every pediatric and psychological association opposes the practice, though not always in language as clear as the title of a recent article by Murray Straus: “Children Should Never, Ever, Be Spanked No Matter What the…
Luard calls the first of his ages, which ran from 1400 to 1559, the Age of Dynasties. In this epoch, royal “houses,” or extended coalitions based on kinship, vied for control of European turfs. A little biology shows why the idea of basing leadership on inheritance is a recipe for endless wars of succession. Rulers…
Take those born with genes that make them a bit taller and quicker than average. When they start school, they are likely to be a bit better at basketball. The advantage may be modest but then reciprocal causation between the talent advantage and environment kicks in. Because you are better at basketball, you are…
The brain’s main job is prioritizing information relevant to our survival. Anything that suggests the possibility of danger, whether real or imagined, becomes a higher priority than anything else that is going on at that moment. This data is processed first, shifting our attention from cognitive processes down to the…
The central idea of Radical Behaviorism—that all behavior can be explained as the result of learned associations between a stimulus and a response, reinforced or extinguished through reward and/or punishment—stems from the early 20th century psychologists B.F. Skinner (at Harvard) and John B. Watson (at John Hopkins)…
The DHA-deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates synaptic function in the brain. A closer look at the rats' brain tissue suggested that insulin had lost much of its power to influence the brain cells. "Because insulin can penetrate the blood–brain…
This is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to summarize data available on the effects of mindfulness-based trainings for children and youths in a school setting. Twenty-four studies were located that report a significant medium effect size of g = 0.40 across all controlled studies and domains. Remarkably…
Walter Glannon has argued that a lifespan of 200 years or more would be undesirable because personal identity could not be persevered over such a long life (Glannon 2002). Glannon’s argument presupposes that personal identity (understood here as a determinant of our prudential concerns) depends on psychological…
Take the word ghost, for example. Always having seen it speld in this way, we hav come to associate the feelings arousd by the idea ghost with its accustomd form of visual representation. To meet the word in our reading instantly and instinctivly excites those feelings in our minds. To meet the same word speld gost…
Forty-five percent of people who go to college, four year colleges, don't get a bachelors degree within six years. Those people often have met with disappointment and their investment isn't particularly good, necessarily. Another group of people graduate from college and then have trouble getting jobs and end up…
The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science…
Boundless Expansion: Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe…
Endless eXtension - Extropists seek perpetual growth and progress in all aspects of human endeavor. We are, as a species and as a culture, never finished or in any essential way complete. Instead, we continually pursue knowledge, we constantly experiment, we forever continue to develop techniques that improve our…
Enlightened believe in science, observation, and understanding of natural phenomenon. The word Solstice reflects that on this one day, the sun stands still How did the ancients explain this? With Fear or Celebration? They turned to astronomy and the observation of the heavenly bodies that dance in the depths of space…
Even when writers profess to know nothing about the inner man, they often make the profession in a way which suggests that they really know plenty When D. H. Lawrence says (in his essay on Benjamin Franklin) "The soul of man is a dark forest," he says it with a kind of knowing Satanic smirk, so that the profession of…
The areas of academic interest (sciences or humanities) and area of study have been known to be associated with a number of factors associated with autistic traits. However, despite the vast amount of literature on the psychological and physiological characteristics associated with faculty membership, brain structural…
A new study appearing Aug. 1 in the journal Current Anthropology finds that human skulls changed in ways that indicate a lowering of testosterone levels at around the same time that culture was blossoming. “The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at…
I’m not the first person to notice that reality is broken compared with games, especially when it comes to giving us good, hard work. In fact, the science of happiness was first born thirty-five years ago, when an American psychologist by the name of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi observed the very same thing. In 1975…
As a golfer, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes golf a game is that you…
When you write something down, either while taking notes or while trying to write your own original thoughts, you’re dealing with what literacy scholars call “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. One of the reasons we formally teach…