I’ve been watching a lot of TED talks recently (part of a NY’s resolution), and have been struck by the number that say something along the lines of “school is broken” and “how do we make children like school?”. There’s a sad story about a tiger called Mohini that Tara Brach tells as follows. Mohini was a regal white tiger … Read More
Excellence article by Raymond Tallis: Neurotrash | New Humanist
such are the limitations of our understanding of the brain, attempting to apply the findings of neuroscience to social policy would be premature, even if this were not wrong in principle. But it is wrong in principle. The fabric of the human world, of the public space that is the arena of our lives, is woven out of explicit shared … Read More
The Starfish Revolution? – Iranian mobs, smart mobs – or just a large group of angry people
Although there is a troika (Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami) that inspires many of “The Green Path of Hope” , there seems to be a lack of top-down leadership. Indeed, Mousavi has been at pains to say that the people are the true leaders, that he is not creating a political movement but a “social network,” and that the strength of … Read More
Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind
21st century skills are, in short, an operating system for the mind. Source: here
The Cognitive Science of Skills and Learning
most computing applications, which separate data structures (which we could liken to human knowledge) and processes that operate on them (which we could liken to human thinking skills); so long as the data are in a compatible format, the computing processes can operate on any data that are entered. In the human mind, however, knowledge and processing are more often … Read More
Biomimicry
Jeremy Faludi over at Worldchanging has a nice primer on biomimicry. “Most designers, engineers, architects, and other people who build things just don’t know that much about biology and the natural world; and even when they do, there’s often a gap of capability in available materials, manufacturing methods, and economic systems … Even with existing technology, however, an enormous realm … Read More
Knowledge Territories
On why saying what you know is like a dog pissing against a lamp-post
Blog Jazz
On the use of moods to communicate in blogs
The Making of Memory: Chapter 4 Notes – PT II
On the 3 types of scientific metaphor, and the grim ascendancy of maths over biology.
Making of Memory (4)
On memory, metaphors, and a little bit of heresy