TOK@ISPrague

The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious role in framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in Psychological Science. “By having another language, you have an alternative vision of the world,”

A recent scientific study published in the journal Acta Psychologica suggests that people enjoy art more and remember it longer when they see it “live” in museums, as opposed to online.Continue reading the main story We don’t need science to tell us why this might be. Museums, like churches and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying, reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting, object placement and ritualized behavior. Very different designs — from the processional layout of the Metropolitan Museum to the labyrinthine tangle of the new Fondation Louis Vuitton art center in Paris — can be equally effective. And some don’t work.

Cellphone snapshots, the souvenir postcards of the present, are fine, and that they can be widely, even endlessly sent and shared is great. The digital presence of entire museum collections online is a tremendous thing, a gift of pleasure and knowledge to museumgoers, scholars and artists alike.But a snapshot is frozen in time. An archive of reproductions isn’t alive. And the further we distance ourselves from art itself, from being in front of it with all filters gone, life is what we lose — art’s and ours.

First, the phenomenon of Brittany Maynard has transformed the movement for end-of-life-choice into an unstoppable force. Ms. Maynard was the 29-year-old woman dying of brain cancer, who moved, with her family, from her home in California to establish residency in Oregon and gain access to aid in dying. As her pain and seizures escalated and as inevitable paralysis, blindness and stupor approached, she drank medication obtained under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act and died quietly in a circle of her loved ones last fall. Her family vows to fulfill her legacy of legal reform in her native California and beyond. Young and old alike identify with Brittany Maynard. Her experience as a refugee for dignity sparks the “aha!” moment when people understand the grave injustice of government’s withholding from a competent, dying adult the elements of choice and control over suffering.

we not only discount or dismiss scientific information inconsistent with our ideology; we may also distrust and attack its source(s).

Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, this biased processing is most likely to occur among people who have greater cognitive and reasoning capabilities–not less. Where the two sets of explanations for ideological divides on science differ is on how motivated reasoning leads to bias.

Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.

Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.  

After nearly a decade researching this field, Piff has come to the controversial conclusion that being wealthy, rather than transforming you into a benevolent benefactor, can actually be rather bad for your moral fibre.

Science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign world view, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe. But science is a place where such confrontation is explicit and accessible. It didn’t take more than a simple experiment for Galileo to overturn the wisdom of Aristotle. Informed doubt is the very essence of science.

Last week, my colleague listened to his father, behind a drawn hospital curtain, doing an Alzheimer's diagnostic test. He said that the trickiest part was when they read out a list of words but instead of asking you to repeat them they moved on to some numerical questions before asking you to list the words a moment later. He was petrified to find that he couldn't do it himself.

The line between life and death is best defined not by machines, but by patients’ beliefs about what kind of life gives them meaning, and how much they would endure to extend it. If