Note to readers: In another installment of a debate on The Brilliant Blog about the value of reading literature, psychologist Keith Oatley responds to the comments of philosopher Gregory Currie. To recap: Currie claimed in a New York Times essay that there is “no compelling evidence” that reading literature improves us as people; I wrote on Time.com that there is
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Note to readers: In a recent Time.com essay, I responded to Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, who had written in The New York Times that there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy” or other great books. Professor Currie has now returned the favor; his
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Nate Kornell, a psychology professor at Williams College who does really interesting work on the science of learning and memory, writes in his Psychology Today blog about what kind of teaching promotes deep learning. As he explains, it’s not necessarily the kind of teaching that leads to A’s early on, or that leads to enthusiastic student evaluations. The research Kornell
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Fascinated by the idea that print media may be the best “discovery engine” we have for finding information we didn’t know we were looking for (a notion I first encountered here), I tracked down this article in The Wilson Quarterly by Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT. “There are at least three ways we discover
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In Intelligent Life, a magazine produced by The Economist, writer Ian Leslie has a fascinating piece on the importance—and increasing scarcity—of serendipity: “Today’s world wide web has developed to organize, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for
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Where are creative, risk-taking people most likely to live? To identify the areas of the country where a feeling of entrepreneurial spirit is “most at home,” a team of researchers, including University of Texas-Austin professor Samuel Gosling, analyzed the personalities of more than 500,000 U.S. citizens, then correlated their findings with economic data derived from various geographical regions. From the
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How to promote ethical behavior on the job? “A common opinion is that the way to avoid ethical lapses is to figure out how to hire good people,” writes Christopher M. Barnes on the website of the Harvard Business Review. “Good people do good things and bad people do bad things: it’s as simple as that.” But actually, it’s not
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When a minaret dating from the twelfth century was toppled in the fighting between rebels and government forces in Aleppo, Syria, earlier this spring, we recognized that more than a building had been lost. The destruction of irreplaceable artifacts—like the massive Buddha statues dynamited in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan in 2001 and the ancient texts burned and looted in
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Yesterday on the Brilliant Blog, I wrote about researcher’s efforts to use teenagers’ keen social sensitivity to produce positive behavior change (e.g., working harder at school, avoiding risky behavior like speeding). To my surprise, a heated debate broke out on my Facebook page over the appropriateness of “manipulating” young people’s behavior. Reader Courtney Ostaff feels such social engineering is unethical,
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In a paper published earlier this week in the journal Science, researchers report that they have found three robust regions in the human genome that are tied to educational attainment, writes Paul Voosen in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But the links they found were “microscopic,” Voosen notes: “How small? For perspective, the largest link they found could account for
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