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Herzing’s paper proposes five indicators of intelligence that any given species or machine (she includes artificial intelligence in her assessment) might combine in its own way: first, the size of the subject’s brain (if it has one) relative to the rest of the body; second, the extent to which an entity sends and receives information; third, the degree to which individual members of a species are distinct from one another; fourth, the complexity of the being’s social life; and, fifth, the amount of interaction it has with members of other species. One way to be intelligent is to score high on all five measures, as dolphins do, for instance.

A puzzlement. Why, I wonder, are both these things true? There is an animal, a wee little thing, the size of a poppy seed, that lives in lakes and rivers and eats whatever flows through it; it's called a gastrotrich. It has an extremely short life. Hello, Goodbye, I'm Dead It hatches. Three days later, it's all grown up, with a fully adult body "complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs and a brain," says science writer Carl Zimmer. In 72 hours it's ready to make babies, and as soon as it does, it begins to shrivel, crumple ... and usually within a week, it's gone. Dead of old age. Sad, no? A seven-day life. But now comes the weird part. There's another very small animal (a little bigger than a gastrotrich) that also lives in freshwater ponds and lakes, also matures very quickly, also reproduces within three or four days. But, oh, my God, this one has a totally different life span (and when I say totally, I mean it's radically, wildly, unfathomably different) from a gastrotrich. It's a hydra. And what it does — or rather, what it doesn't do — is worthy of a motion picture. So we made one. Well, a little one. With my NPR colleague, science reporter Adam Cole, we're going to show you what science has learned about the hydra. Adam drew it, animated it, scored it, edited it. My only contribution was writing it with him, but what you are about to see is as close as science gets to a miracle.

One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.

Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.

There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.

But now experts say a reliance on sat-navs and smartphone map apps is undermining map-reading skills. So here are five reasons why you should love maps and resist the easy attraction of the sat-nav.

The digital age is also raising broader philosophical questions about memory. How much do we need to remember when it can be effortlessly recalled for us by a machine? If the use of search engines for retrieving facts is allowed at some point in the future, exams themselves might have to change.

Language, Darwin believed, was not a conscious invention but a phenomenon “slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.” But what makes a language a language? In this short animation from TED Ed, linguist John McWhorter, author of the indispensable The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (public library), explores the fascinating world of fantasy constructed languages — known as conlangs — from Game of Thrones’ Dothraki to Avatar’s Na’vi to Star Trek’s Klingon to Lord of the Rings’ Elvish. Though fictional, these conlangs reveal a great deal about the fundamentals of real human communication and help us understand the essential components of a successful language — extensive vocabulary, consistent grammar rules but peppered with exceptions, and just the right amount of room for messiness and evolution.

Kuşköy is remarkable not for how it looks but for how it sounds: here, the roar of the water and the daily calls to prayer are often accompanied by loud, lilting whistles—the distinctive tones of the local language. Over the past half-century, linguists and reporters curious about what locals call kuş dili, or “bird language,” have occasionally struggled up the footpaths and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy. So its thousand or so residents were not all that surprised when, a few years ago, a Turkish-born German biopsychologist named Onur Güntürkün showed up and asked them to participate in a study.

There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. It’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language.

This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever.

And whenever I see or hear journalists or politicians discussing a particularly important social science – economics – I just don’t see them making the same efforts of jargon removal and technical translation. Whether it’s discussion of debt, or the argument for austerity, it’s hard to find good economics communication, where the language is rinsed free of jargon.

I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called “sanctified culture,” and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but really ought to be called “everyday culture” — the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music I listen to, the movies you see, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so thrilling, so moving — I’ve always believed that these divisions are false.

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed