TOK@ISPrague

That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”

The new research is further confirmation of a trend that scientists have been aware of for some time. In 1982, James Flynn, a philosopher and psychologist based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, was looking through old American test manuals for IQ tests. He noticed that when tests were revised every 25 years or so, the test-setters would get a panel to sit both the old test and the new one. "And I noticed in all the test manuals, in every instance, those who took the old test got a higher score than they did on the new test," says Flynn. In other words, the tests were becoming harder. This became known as the Flynn Effect, though Flynn stresses he was not the first to notice the pattern, and did not come up with the name. But if the tests were getting harder, and the average score was steady at 100, people must have been getting better at them. It would seem they were getting more intelligent. If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.

the best of what America offers are owning up to shameful pasts, from slavery to the mistreatment of Native Americans. In some cases, the institutions are apologizing for past moral failings, as Longwood has in Prince Edward County. Others are going even further, with faculty incorporating the long-overlooked histories into their instruction and administrators reaching out to disenfranchised communities that were once excluded from campus life.

Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible

Millions of Soviet citizens were sent to labour camps in the notorious Gulag system, or shot, during Joseph Stalin's hardline communist rule. The worst repressions took place in the 1930s.

What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. As Münsterberg observed of the farmer’s son, the students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.