Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Everything you wanted - or didn't want - to know about your mind. From how many friends your brain can cope with, to experts discussing consciousness and mental illness
Or, why 9/11 didn't happen quite the way you remember it. Each time we recall a memory, we have to store it afresh, and in doing so we may alter it—making most-recalled events most prone to falsification
Wonderful essay on reason, memory and the mind. Is remembering really an act of creation? Is reason no more than the "act of justifying a spontaneous reaction"? Thought-provoking, if at times controversial
Experts remember complex patterns: a London taxi driver holds a map of the city in his head. But randomise the pattern, and the advantage disappears: it's a rare cabbie who can cope with a sudden detour
Short, dense, useful essay on limits of neuroscientific tools in philosophical investigation of the mind. A brain in isolation is not a mind. A mind must interact with a social and physical environment
How Mr. Dunbar, of Dunbar Number fame, has correlated the size of an individual's pre-frontal cortex with size of their social network. Supports view that humans developed big brains to understand each other, not the world
Neurological oddity worthy of Oliver Sacks. "One day in 2005 a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint. His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind"
Inside the annual Turing Test: Can a machine think? "The thought of going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against some of the world’s top AI programs filled me with a romantic notion that I would be defending the human race"
Just as 19C scientists cut up brains hoping to show that women were intellectually inferior to men, 21C neuroscientists do much same with their brain-scans, scientific papers. Yes, they find differences between sexes. But so what?
![[6] A night full of sleep by J. Star](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/78/199307915_0b3ff16e3d_s.jpg "[6] A night full of sleep by J. Star")
"Have you ever woken up and not been able to move your body?" Interesting discussion of rare sensation of sleep paralysis. Test hypothesis proposed that route cause is desynchronisation of the thalamus and cortex brain regions
Will we end up with a pill to boost our memory? Ground-breaking research shows that hormone injections make rats form stronger memories that last longer. Potential for future use against Alzheimers. Brief, worthwhile read
One tiny patch of brain cells located in a male mouse determines "whether it fights or mates, and there is good reason to believe humans possess a similar circuit." Are violent sex offences caused by miswiring of this circuit?
Are brains of psychopaths physically abnormal, and what are the implications for criminal justice if they are? Will brain scans become as common in court cases as DNA testing? Second in three-part series, all worth reading
Unsentimental, uplifting first-person account. "Having a catastrophic illness is an interesting experience if it doesn't see you off"
Haunting extract from a diary of mental illness, by a property analyst who takes five psychotropic medications daily
New evidence suggests that gaming makes people more attentive and able to use less brain-power to complete complex tasks. Similarities between advanced gamers and professional musicians abound. Short but fascinating
The Professor of Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute selects books on how memories are made and discusses the effect of digital data storage on our perception of the present and the future
