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"FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late '90s, I had Asperger syndrome. There's an educational video from that time, called "Understanding Asperger's," in which I appear. I am the affected 20-year-old in the wannabe-hipster vintage polo shirt talking about how keen his understanding of literature is and how misunderstood he was in fifth grade. The film was a research project directed by my mother, a psychology professor and Asperger specialist, and another expert in her department. It presents me as a young man living a full, meaningful life, despite his mental abnormality. "Understanding Asperger's" was no act of fraud. Both my mother and her colleague believed I met the diagnostic criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. The manual, still the authoritative text for American therapists, hospitals and insurers, listed the symptoms exhibited by people with Asperger disorder, and, when I was 17, I was judged to fit the bill. I exhibited a "qualified impairment in social interaction," specifically "failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level" (I had few friends) and a "lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people" (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an "encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus" (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels). The general idea with a psychological diagnosis is that it applies when the tendencies involved inhibit a person's ability to experience a happy, normal life. And in my c

"'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.' "We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology," Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, "and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster." Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging "citizen science," for many "citizens" the understanding of - let alone any agreement about - what science is and does remains meager. So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and contentious. Gathered here are several eloquent definitions that focus on science as process rather than product, whose conduit is curiosity rather than certainty."

To better understand the world in which they will live, students need foundations in economics, statistics, finance and psychology.

"Since humankind first put brush to canvas, artists have played with the mind and the senses to create sublime atmospheres and odd impressions. It is only recently, with a blossoming understanding of the way the brain deconstructs images, that neuroscientists and psychologists have finally begun to understand how these tricks work. "

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded

"Neil Postman - 6 Questions for Understanding Media "

"Do the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggest that the autistic mind and the philosophical mind have something in common?"

" Richard Dawkins in furious row with EO Wilson over theory of evolution Vanessa Thorpe The Observer, Sunday 24 June 2012 A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve. The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson's theory "as implausible and as unsupported by evidence"."

"SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins - one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin m

"The age of criminal responsibility acts as the gateway to the criminal justice system - under a certain age you are kept out. Most jurisdictions have this age barrier because it's widely understood children need sheltering from the criminal law consequences of their behaviour until they are developed enough to understand whether their behaviour is wrong. But what age is the right age? And how do legal systems deal with this difficult question?"

"What can mathematics say about history? According to TED Fellow Jean-Baptiste Michel, quite a lot. From changes to language to the deadliness of wars, he shows how digitized history is just starting to reveal deep underlying patterns. Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world."

"A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field of literary theory. "At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift," the article said. Does this research - "neuro lit" is one of its nicknames - energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don't understand what the scholars are saying? "

"But a better understanding of Asian writing systems has not stopped Western experts from making grand claims about their virtues and limitations. The latest scholar to venture into such politically sensitive territory is William C. Hannas, a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a federal agency in Washington. In a polemical new book, ''The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity'' (University of Pennsylvania Press), Mr. Hannas blames the writing systems of China, Japan and Korea for what he says is East Asia's failure to make significant scientific and technological breakthroughs compared to Western nations. Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity. "

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

"Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain. For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study. Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate. Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment. The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol. More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar. Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds."

"Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss imaginary numbers. In the sixteenth century, a group of mathematicians in Bologna found a solution to a problem that had puzzled generations before them: a completely new kind of number. For more than a century this discovery was greeted with such scepticism that the great French thinker Rene Descartes dismissed it as an "imaginary" number. The name stuck - but so did the numbers. Long dismissed as useless or even fictitious, the imaginary number i and its properties were first explored seriously in the eighteenth century. Today the imaginary numbers are in daily use by engineers, and are vital to our understanding of phenomena including electricity and radio waves."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of geography and ecology in determining world history since civilisation began. The 18th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished, but this understanding of history is being increasingly called into question. Professor Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, which won the 1998 Rhone Poulenc Prize for Science and the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is a re-evaluation of the last 13,000 years of the history of mankind - particularly in the light of geography and ecology. But what are the implications of looking at world history as being determined by geography and ecology? Is environment really the determining factor in history? And if so, what role does cultural heritage play in shaping different histories? With Professor Jared Diamond, ecologist and physiologist at the Los Angeles Medical School, University of California, and author of Guns, Germs and Steel; Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University."

"Sixty years ago, Allied forces brought an end to Adolf Hitler's dream that Germany would rule Europe and dominate the world. The death of Nazi Germany gave birth to a charge that still haunts the scientific community--what might be called "the Nazi analogy." In ethical or policy disputes about science and medicine, no argument can bring debate to a more screeching halt then the invocation of the Nazi comparison. Whether the subject is stem cell research, end-of-life care, the conduct of clinical trials in poor nations, abortion, embryo research, animal experimentation, genetic testing, or human experimentation involving vulnerable populations, references to Nazi policies or practices tumble forth from critics. "If X is done, then we are on the road to Nazi Germany" has become a commonplace claim in contemporary bioethical debates. Sadly, too often those who draw an analogy between current behavior and what the Nazis did do not know what they are talking about. The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine. Because its misuse diminishes the horror done by Nazi scientists and doctors to their victims, it is ethically incumbent upon those who invoke the Nazi analogy to understand what they are claiming."

"Neuroscientists understand the structural bases of some of these qualities. Take language, that uniquely human behavior. Underlining it are structures unique to the human brain - regions like "Broca's area," which specializes in language production. Then there's the brain's "extrapyramidal system," which is involved in fine motor control. The complexity of the human version allows us to do something that, say, a polar bear, could never accomplish - sufficiently independent movement of digits to play a trill on the piano, for instance. Particularly striking is the human frontal cortex. While occurring in all mammals, the human version is proportionately bigger and denser in its wiring. And what is the frontal cortex good for? Emotional regulation, gratification postponement, executive decision-making, long-term planning. We study hard in high school to get admitted to a top college to get into grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don't do that."

"Scientists are beginning to understand how the human brain accomplishes a remarkable trick known as the cocktail party effect. It's what allows us to pick out the words from just one speaker even when we're in a room full of other voices that are just as loud. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how our brain is able to focus on certain sounds while filtering out others. Now they say they're finding clues, thanks to new research on birds and bats. Birds don't spend much time at cocktail parties, but they do face a similar auditory challenge, says Frederic Theunissen of the University of California, Berkeley. "Take a walk in the forest," Theunissen says. "It's clear that these animals are very vocal, and sometimes when there are large groups of them it becomes a cacophony of sounds - just like when there's large groups of humans." And just like humans, some birds need to pick out just one voice in the crowd, Theunissen says. "In the species that I study, the zebra finch, they make lifelong couples, and it's very important for them to recognize their mate," he says."