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October 24, 2008 - Google Tech Talks June 16, 2008 ABSTRACT Explore the brain's amazing ability to change throughout a person's life. This phenomenon-called neuroplasticty-is the science behind brain fitness, and it has been called one of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries of the 20th century. PBS had recently aired this special, The Brain Fitness Program, which explains the brain's complexities in a way that both scientists and people with no scientific background can appreciate. This is opportunity to learn more about how our minds work-and to find out more about the latest in cutting-edge brain research, from the founder of Posit Science and creator of the Brain Fitness Program software, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Speaker: Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. Michael M. Merzenich, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zulch Prize of the Max Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language

The book was originally titled Thinking About Thinking. Just arriving in bookstores from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, it's now called Thinking, Fast and Slow. It's wonderful, of course. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind it is so rich and fascinating that any summary of it would seem absurd. Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters-he names them "System 1" and "System 2"-that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can't be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.

"Wie oft pro Tag will jemand etwas von uns, will uns überreden und überzeugen? Vielleicht 20- oder 30-mal, würden die meisten Menschen schätzen. Psychologen haben das untersucht: Es geschieht 400-mal am Tag.... Weniger amüsant ist es, wenn der menschliche Autopilot im Gerichtssaal sein Unwesen treibt. Zahlreiche Untersuchungen belegen, dass attraktive ­Angeklagte mildere Strafen erhalten, Angehörige der «falschen» Ethnie ­härtere. Vorbestrafte werden häufiger schuldig gesprochen. «Solche Urteilsschlüsse verstossen gegen gesetzliche Regeln und ethische Prinzipien», sagt die Psychologieprofessorin Margit Oswald von der Universität Bern, die solche nicht-legalen Einflüsse untersucht. So erschreckend das klingen mag, so zeigt es auch, dass wir von den meisten Beeinflussungsversuchen nichts mitbekommen. Menschen und ihre Bot­schaften manipulieren wirkungsvoll unser Unbewusstes."

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