I’ve been thinking a lot this week about assumptions. Especially when it comes to trying to study bold, complicated and human constructs like love, empathy and creativity in the brain. […]
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We tend to think of the brain as a giant lump of gray matter, as a marvelously complex structure that controls consciousness and intelligence. But what if the human brain is […]
Researchers at an English university have created a robot that learns language like an infant. The achievement represents a major advance in the creation of artificial intelligence.
In our current “War on Terror,” it’s sometimes hard to imagine or appreciate the terrors of times gone by. For Americans of the 19th century, stories of shipwrecks struck deep […]
On Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday, writer and musician Henry Rollins’ reflections on the power – and limitations – of music.
What does race mean? It is the lingering question in the discovery of the biology of race. Scientists study the various diseases that affect people of different races; however, it is believed this is not the appropriate route.
What’s the Big Idea? The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of The Secret, not the theory […]
It’s not all unicorns and rainbows in Silicon Valley these days. Already, voices are starting to grumble that it is The End of the Beginning for Silicon Valley, that Startups Are Boring, […]
What’s the Latest Development? It has become all too common to walk down a busy city street and see the majority of pedestrians glued to their phones and inattentive to […]
UPDATE: The three members of Pussy Riot have been found guilty for “hooliganism” on Friday August 17th in one of the closest watched Russian trials since the Stalinist regime and […]
Upon hearing of the passing last week of journalist and art critic Robert Hughes (shown above), I felt like had lost a beloved teacher. For people who read Hughes’ books […]
Many of our cities still bear the scars from past centuries’ segregation policies. So new urban movements want to take advantage of urban population growth to make the city a better place.
You might have had an experience like this: You’re cruising down the highway, with nothing in particular on your mind, when, suddenly, you let out an audible groan, remembering one […]
Like most people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado. And over the past week, I’ve seen the tragedy dissected in all manner of ways. I’ve […]
Mitt Romney addresses the nation at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. How well have his warm-up acts set the stage for his big speech? I’ll assess the four […]
The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the portrait of a man fighting a one-man war of ideas with the Chinese government, daily putting his own life at risk for the sake of the country he loves.
Right after my recent post on “psychopunditry,” I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this […]
If you’re a parent and you want to introduce your child to art, it’s sometimes hard to find that perfect combination of optimism and imagination in a single artist. Too […]
Quick. Grab a pencil. Some crayons. A notepad. Wrap your brain around this Friday’s Big Enigma from Ivan Moscovitch’s The Big Book of Brain Games. Share a photo of your solution […]
Harvard researcher Elizabeth Spelke studies the minds of babies to better understand how we think and behave as adults. She believes language is the key to our creative processes.
Two previously blind British patients have had partial vision restored by a microchip implanted behind their retinas, indicating to the brain that the eye is receiving light.
British scientists have created artificial muscles that mimic the actual muscle of squids, helping researchers create active-camouflage clothing and smart skin to regulate our temperature.
[Author’s Note: In keeping with the tradition that whenever you have a blog post whose title is a question, the answer is always “no”…] Of all the essays I’ve written, […]
There’s no such thing as universality in art, says Stephen Greenblatt. We always create and read from the perspective of our own time and place. What then accounts for the curious power some works have to communicate with us directly across the centuries?
In 1923, during an exhibition of his art collection that would become the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, two years later, Dr. Albert C. Barnes told an interviewer, “I am […]
Jad Abumrad loves collecting sounds and playing with high-tech gadgetry, but he deploys his geekery in service of a higher calling – creating in Radiolab a hybrid medium that is a natural evolution of the ancient art of storytelling.
This is a lengthy post but I want to do justice to Adam Lee, Big Think and the arguments. These are my initial thoughts. Fellow Big Think blogger and friend, […]
What’s the Big Idea? My brother-in-law, a tenured professor at Osgood law school in Toronto, sent me an article yesterday. “This will interest you. Anne-Marie is a rockstar academic!” The […]
“Self-plagiarism” is the grandiose new term for the re-use of one’s own words in several journalistic articles, for which Jonah Lehrer became famous last week. Lehrer’s problems then expanded to […]
The presiding philosophy of the Laboratory for Perception is ultimately more informed by the possibilities of the future than by the past. Eagleman is fascinated by the idea that we could import the technology into human biology to enhance our sensory perception of the world, broadening and deepening our reality.