Who owns your memories? You’d think that would be you. But in a short interview with Claudia Dreifus at the New York Times, neuroethicist Matthew Liao notes that to the extent our devices are serving as outsourced personal memory banks, you may be sharing ownership with, say, Facebook: Lately, you’ve been writing about this question: […]
Continue reading →Ask not what your genes have done to make you smart, but what they’ve done to make you stupid. That’s the gist of an idea offered recently by neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell in a “The genetics of stupidity,” a fun, provocative post at his blog, Wiring the Brain. Today I unpack this idea a bit in a piece in […]
Continue reading →The fMRI scan above shows my brain* reading a truly horrific NY Times Op-Ed piece. The piece, written by a man named Martin Lindstrom, who calls himself a “fan of the consumer” (meaning what? he blows on us?), is called You Love Your iPhone. Literally. Literally. Lindstrom claims to see actual love for iPhones declared by the insulas of […]
Continue reading →Where does consciousness come from? And when it ramps up or down, at what point does it move from consciousness to not-consciousness? Carl Zimmer published both a blog post and a story in the New York Times yesterday looking at the work of Guilioi Tononi, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who looks at these questions. […]
Continue reading →Caleb Carr on why he remains pessimistic about reading despite the recent National Endowment of the Arts report showing a reversal last year in a 25-year decline in reading. It’s a good consideration of several ways i which the data might be a mismeasure or a misleading anomaly.
Continue reading →Steven Waldman: Why the Huffington Post Can’t Replace The New York Times The idea that the Huffington Post, or the explosion of interesting internet news or blogging sites, can replace journalistic institutions like the New York times or other newspapers or dinosaurs of the mainstream media truly misunderstands the web, newspapers, journalism and the serious […]
Continue reading →The bloggers at the design firm Pentagram know how to write a lede: During the financially dismal 2008 holiday shopping season, one product held up nicely: bras. Some great design worth exploring there, from the outfit that did the signage for the front of the Times building and the Atlantic redesign.
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