Verbal Tennis

Verbal Tennis is an unusual game in which two players carry on a conversation, taking turns making statements. The only rules are that each statement must be in the form of a question and cannot repeat another statement that has already been made. If a player gets stuck and cannot make a coherent response to the previous statement, he or she loses. A game might begin as follows: PLAYER 1:Are you feeling well today? PLAYER 2:Don't I look well? PLAYER 1:If I knew that, why would I have asked y...

 Underreported Atheists

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.”...

 A User Interface Can Change the Way We Think

In extreme cases, to use such an interface is to enter a new world, containing objects and actions unlike any you've previously seen. At first these elements seem strange. But as they become familiar, you internalize the elements of this world. Eventually, you become fluent, discovering powerful and surprising idioms, emergent patterns hidden within the interface. You begin to think with the interface, learning patterns of thought that would formerly have seemed strange, but which become seco...

 "Holistic" is a Word That Hides Our Ignorance

We're often told that certain wholes are more than the sum of their parts. We hear this expressed with reverent words like holistic and gestalt, whose academic tones suggest that they refer to clear and definite ideas. But I suspect the actual function of such terms is to anesthetize a sense of ignorance. We say gestalt when things combine to act in ways we can't explain, holistic when we're caught off guard by unexpected happenings and realize we understand less than we thought we did.