18 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
Habituation and Novelty
Beginning in infancy and throughout the life span, humans are motivated by newness, change, and excitement. Habituation, the tendency to lose interest in a repeated event and gain interest in a new one, is one of the most fundamental human reflexes. If the thermostat were to suddenly turn the air conditioning on, you would hear the loud humming sound begin, but within minutes you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. Habituation, a fundamental property of the nervous system, provides mechanis...10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Flow Promotes Learning
Experiences that are well aligned with flow are those that we have no trouble committing to for a long time. We concentrate on them for hours at a time because we’re getting rewarded for that concentration. Even more important, perhaps, is that when we’re playing games, we want to enter that deep state of concentration. Well-crafted experiences offer a deep and effortless involvement that separates the experience of play from the experience of ordinary life. These experiences are enjoyabl...28 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
The Staggering Amount of Progress Made in Recent History
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'Millennium' is full of gratitude for the staggering advances of 1,000 years
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One of the most bracing aspects of 'Millennium' is the breadth of factors it covers, from food production to sanitation conditions to the Christian Church Militant to the development of firearms to radical changes in transportation of both people and products.
By Steve Donoghue NOVEMBER 24, 2016
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Unlike Physics, Biology Can't Ignore Information
Physicists love to think about systems that take only a little information to describe. So when they get a system that takes a lot of information to describe, they use a trick called 'statistical mechanics', where you try to ignore most of this information and focus on a few especially important variables. For example, if you hand a physicist a box of gas, they'll try to avoid thinking about the state of each atom, and instead focus on a few macroscopic quantities like the volume and total en...03 JUN 2016 by ideonexus