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Part 1 of a 4-part series examining what happens when science is used for marketing (using brain-training software as the central example). Almost all of the programs that tout their ability to train your brain are limited in scope. Most train your ability to perform simple cognitive tasks by having you perform them repeatedly, often adapting the difficulty of the task over time to keep it challenging. Some determine which tasks you perform well and which need improvement and adjust the tasks based on your ongoing performance. The simplest ones, though, simply track how much you improve and inform you that such improvements have made increased the fitness of your brain. Such task-specific training effects can be really useful-if you want to enhance your ability to do Sudoku, by all means practice doing Sudoku. But what pitches for those programs regularly imply is that playing their videogame or using their training will enhance your ability to do other tasks that weren't specifically trained. For example, this advertisement for Nintendo's Brain Age implies that by using their game, you will be better able to remember your friend's name when you meet him on the street. The idea that playing games can improve your brain is pervasive, and it taps what Chris Chabris and I have called the "illusion of potential." A common myth of the mind is that we have vast pools of untapped mental resources that can be released with relatively minimal effort. This common intuitive belief underlies the pervasive myth that we only use 10% of our brains, that listening to Mozart can increase our IQ [pdf], and even the belief that some people have "discovered" psychic abilities. We devote the last main chapter of The Invisible Gorilla to this belief and its ramifications, and we recently wrote a column for the NY Times discussing how popular self-help books like The Secret and The Power capitalize on this mistaken belief. The marketing for some brain training programs

"LOS ANGELES (October 20, 2010) - The Parents Television Council™ denounced the makers of the TV show "Glee" for a hyper-sexualized GQ photo shoot that will be featured in the November issue. "Glee" airs on Tuesdays at 8:00 pm ET/PT (7:00 pm CT/MT) on Fox. "It is disturbing that GQ, which is explicitly written for adult men, is sexualizing the actresses who play high school-aged characters on 'Glee' in this way. It borders on pedophilia. Sadly, this is just the latest example of the overt sexualization of young girls in entertainment," said PTC President Tim Winter. "Many children who flocked to 'High School Musical' have grown into 'Glee' fans. They are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters posing in front of school lockers, one of them opting for a full-frontal crotch shot. By authorizing this kind of near-pornographic display, the creators of the program have established their intentions on the show's direction. And it isn't good for families."

"VANDALS have struck a painting that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals hanging out. Two men defaced the picture with gobs of paint, as Mr Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order yesterday to have the painting removed from an art gallery. The case is spiced with freedom of expression on the one hand and the right to dignity on the other. It took centre stage after the painting by Brett Murray went on display in a Johannesburg gallery this month and was reported on in local media. Mr Zuma, who has a reputation for promiscuity, took the depiction of him with his private parts exposed very personally and compared himself to a rape victim. Mr Zuma himself was put on trial for rape, and acquitted, in 2006. "The portrayal has ridiculed and caused me humiliation and indignity," Mr Zuma contended in an affidavit filed yesterday with the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. Presiding over the hearing in a courtroom a few kilometres from the gallery, Judge Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane said the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake. South Africa's constitution protects the right to dignity as well as to freedom of expression. She said the hearing would recommence tomorrow. Mr Zuma and the ANC sought to have the painting, titled "The Spear," removed from the Goodman Gallery and to stop the newspaper City Press from displaying a photo of it on its website. Just before the hearing was scheduled to begin, two men wielding cans of red and black paint calmly walked up to the painting hanging on a gallery wall and took turns defacing it. "Now it's completely and utterly destroyed," said Iman Rappetti, a reporter for a South African TV channel who happened to be on the scene at the time as her camera rolled. Her channel showed a man in a tweed jacket painting a red X over the president's genital area and then his face. Next, a man in a hoodie smeared bl

"Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the 2010 Isaac Asimov debate at the Hayden Planetarium. He and five panelists debate whether NASA should bother going back to the moon, or just focus on Mars instead. "

"Sam Harris wants to begin talking about morality and human values in the context of our growing scientific understanding of the world."

"If the police want to search your house, they need a warrant. If they want to follow you around in an unmarked car, they don't. But what about GPS technology? It's highly accurate, virtually effortless and law enforcement are using it like never before. But the courts are divided on the legality of GPS and the issue seems destined for the Supreme Court. Law professor Orrin Kerr explains."

"As people have become more and more dependent on the Internet, some have concerns that all that information (and the devices that help us connect to it) could be doing seriously damage to the way we think, interact and learn. But Nick Bilton, lead writer for the New York Times Bits Blog, explains in his new book that he's lived his whole life connected and managed to turn out just fine. He says scientific research backs up his experience."

"Killer Whale" is terrible branding. From now on, people will call you "Happy Silly Fun Fish."

"The economic forecasts are in for 2010, and there are mixed views about whether the economy will turn the corner this year. The consensus among leading economists is for 2.7 percent growth this year. A lot goes in to forecasting the economy and getting the math right is only one of them."

"A good portion of 21st-century news consumers no longer believe in objectivity. They know it isn't possible. And yet the public expects reporters to always play it down the middle, delivering the facts and only the facts, unencumbered by bias. But to what lengths should reporters go? Can they report fairly on beats that encroach on their personal lives? Should they vote? Brooke canvassed an array of (objective) sources and compiled this report."

"HERE IS A mathematician's nightmare I heard in the 1980s when that irritating, unconforming, self-regarding provocateur Benoît Mandelbrot was suddenly famous - fractals, fractals everywhere. The mathematician dreamed that Mandelbrot died, and God spoke: "You know, there really was something to that Mandelbrot." Sure enough. Mandelbrot created nothing less than a new geometry, to stand side by side with Euclid's - a geometry to mirror not the ideal forms of thought but the real complexity of nature. He was a mathematician who was never welcomed into the fraternity ("Fortress Mathematics," he said, where "the highest ambition is to wall off the windows and preserve only one door"), and he pretended that was fine with him. When Yale first hired him to teach, it was in engineering and applied science; for most of his career he was supported at I.B.M.'s Westchester research lab. He called himself a "nomad by choice." He considered himself an experienced refugee: born to a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1924, he immigrated to Paris ahead of the Nazis, then fled farther and farther into the French countryside."

"n September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug. But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me. "

Well known Harvard academic, Marc Hauser, is questioned about the veracity of some of his research publications.

This could be helpful for this year's TOK Essay Title #2: How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge? Also, makes you realize that just because someone has a PhD and tenure at Harvard doesn't mean you can always trust what they say!!!