One of my favorite things this week: John Hawks on the magnificent open-science real-time-science excavation of a newly discovered human fossil dig going on right now in South Africa. Do read the whole thing; what they’re doing there is radical, disruptive, inspiring, and wonderful: In my last post (“In the hot seat”), I explained how […]
Continue reading →In the clip above, filmed in the lab of University of California, Berkeley, cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik, a particularly charming 4-year-old girl named Esther is playing a game that Gopnik made up. The game is called Blickets. The goal is to figure out which of the clay figures are blickets, as indicated by which clay […]
Continue reading →The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Chris Stringer www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive We sapiens weren’t always the only Homos. Not long ago we shared it with Neanderthals, Denisovans, even hobbits, it seems, and perhaps others, most of whom were technically humans, which is to […]
Continue reading →Ever since the late 1990s, when researchers discovered that the human brain takes into our mid-20s to fully develop — far longer than previously thought — the teen brain has been getting a bad rap. Teens, the emerging dominant narrative insisted, were “works in progress” whose “immature brains” left them in a state “akin to mental […]
Continue reading →It’s ridiculous how many things Robert Sapolsky talks about beautifully. Here he’s on a roll about how dopamine drives behavior: It’s not about reward, but its anticipation. And we humans have done well — we’ve developed these splendid executive skills and planning and so on — because these big ol’ brains can maintain that anticipation […]
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