There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book, ideas which relate to the idea of the mind as an emergent projection of the brain, the idea of brain plasticity (our ability to make social adaptations), and a sense of the history of how these changes have led us to where we are today…warts [...]
Most modern schools spend a lot of time inculcating what could be called ‘critical feeling’, in that developing empathy for various victims of social injustice and other social justice topics have the most currency in many progressive teachers eyes. I tend towards the agnostic with regard to many of these topics, in that we seem [...]
This is a strange topic… I have accomplished this sort of ‘offline’ thinking to great advantage (designing and laying out very complex PC boards with very, very high lone densities and the need for very high bandwidth…a long, quite boring story as you progress to any further details…). I would work on designing a PC [...]
I have cynically considered that the growth of Twitter would lead us into an age of the sort of concise wit that Noel Coward would have understood…surprise…this will likely never ensue. For those of you who do treasure a well turned phrase, I have a small list of some snarky and insulting quotes from one [...]
I suppose one could make a reasonable argument that spending 80% of all of one’s reading time on Shakespeare’s works may be time well spent (absolutely well spent!). Of course, only a few English professors (and few enough of them) spend that much time with the bard. After being inculcated to the wonders of his [...]
I have often wondered whether the current movement in education circles towards diminishing the teaching of data in lieu of ‘critical thinking’…in elementary school. We have been seen the ongoing dissolution of teaching such war horses as the multiplication tables (and the consequent loss of gaining the deep structures requisite in being able to perform [...]
This is a topic which I have discussed with other guitarists (ad nauseum) for a couple decades… “What goes on in your mind when you solo?” Most of these discussions have tended towards using metaphors for the mind, to the degree that computer-like scenarios kept cropping up. For instance, while you read this post, you [...]
I spend a lot of time trolling through a wide swath of education related sites and blogs. One of the tropes I see, over and over, is some unholy combinations of selling snake oil with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By this, I would respectfully suggest that presenting a ‘radically new reinvisioning of…let’s [...]
On first sight, this idea…that Brain Fitness is an area where we can make some advances seems quite obvious. Over the last several decades, almost everyone knows, or at least knows where to find information on nutrition, exercise, and the results of getting into better physical shape…It is a multibillion dollar industry… If you add [...]
I love trying to pronounce words I have never seen, and as a means to display my ignorance of neuroscientific research, I have never seen the word ‘ephaptic’ before. The brunt of the following links and quotes relate to some quite interesting news. It seems that neurons operate in ways which we never have seen, [...]
