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You might expect 10 ÷ 5 is the same as 10/5 is the same as 10 over a 5 with a vinculum between them, but each has its own eccentricities. We’ve already noted that ÷ can mean “divide the number on the left by the number on the right” or “divide the expression on the left by the expression on the right.” But it gets really tricky when people assume that a slash replaces a vinculum. Does ab/cd = (ab)÷(cd) or ((ab)÷c)÷d? Does a/b/c mean (a)÷(b)÷(c) or a÷(b/c) or (a/b)÷c? (Answer: Use some parentheses!)

The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts.

In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.

As a curious race we have always liked to know where we are, but it is now almost impossible not to know - our phones, computers and sat navs keep us continually co-ordinated, and through them we are involuntarily tracked ourselves. Once the preserve and privilege of the rich and influential, maps and accurate wayfinding have suddenly come to feel like a birthright

But these days we are all really at the centre of our maps, which is both a useful and egocentric thing. A thousand years ago Jerusalem stood at the centre of the Christian world view, or if you lived in China it was Youzhou. But now it is us, a throbbing green dot on our handhelds. We no longer travel from A to B but from Me to B, and we spread out maps on the floor or on our laps in a car only with wistful nostalgia.

It is still too early to say whether a lessening in our spatial ability and perspective, and our ability to remember landmarks, will decrease that area in our hippocampus that serves as the engine room for such skills, but it is highly likely. An examination of the brains of cab drivers has shown a great expansion in that area due, it is thought, to the retention of many miles of street plans.

Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned

research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong. Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears. Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived.

People projected thoughts into Harambe’s mind. “Our tendency is to see our actions through human lenses,” a neuroscientist named Kurt Gray told the network as the frenzy peaked. “We can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be a gorilla. We can only imagine what it’s like to be us being a gorilla.” This simple fact is responsible for centuries of ethical dispute. One Harambe activist might believe that killing a gorilla as a safeguard against losing human life is unjust due to our cognitive similarity: the way gorillas think is a lot like the way we think, so they merit a similar moral standing. Another might believe that gorillas get their standing from a cognitive dissimilarity: because of our advanced powers of reason, we are called to rise above the cat-eat-mouse game, to be special protectors of animals, from chickens to chimpanzees. (Both views also support untroubled omnivorism: we kill animals because we are but animals, or because our exceptionalism means that human interests win.) These beliefs, obviously opposed, mark our uncertainty about whether we’re rightful peers or masters among other entities with brains.

What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet

In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).

But while non-experts are led by being told what is authentic and what is not, clever forgers do a more elaborate version of the same thing to snare specialists. Rather than telling them “this is authentic,” which would summon a defensive reaction on the part of the expert (“Oh yeah, I’m the expert here, I’ll tell you what’s authentic and what isn’t”), they lay a trail of traps by scattering subtle clues that lead the expert into following a carefully plotted trail, but to come to their own conclusion about the authenticity of the work in question.

But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone No. 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone No. 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person. It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive.

Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly.

But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history.

In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.”

The reward is that it remains the one kind of time travel that works, where you make a wish and actually become a musketeer in Paris or a used-car salesman in Pennsylvania. That one knows, of course, that the actuality is “fictional” or artificial doesn’t change its reality. The vicarious pleasure of reading is, by the perverse principle of professions, one that is often banished from official discussion, but it remains the core activity.

So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die.