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In the end, Mitt Romney didn’t lose the Michigan primary, and he didn’t lose his near-lock on the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum isn’t going away, but a solid victory in Michigan and an easy win in Arizona leaves the Romney campaign’s basic math more or less intact. If their candidate can keep winning contests in the West and Northeast and holding serve across the Midwest, Romney’s rivals won’t be able to stop him from grinding out a victory.

Thanks to his own smooth evasiveness and the blunders of his rivals, meanwhile, he had managed to sidestep the obvious resemblances between his Massachusetts health care bill and the White House’s Affordable Care Act. And by selling himself as a turnaround artist rather than an ideologue, a champion of the middle class rather than a defender of his fellow 1 percenters, he seemed well-positioned to campaign on competence, experience and sound economic stewardship in the general election.

From the very first debates onward, Romney has spent the primary campaign walking a fine line — trying to assuage widespread right-wing doubts about his ideological reliability, while crafting a persona and a policy portfolio that will appeal to moderates as well as conservatives come November.

About half of Americans--46 percent, in the latest Gallup Poll--believe human beings weren't created by evolution. Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan says this is a grave problem. "I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world." Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum says Andrew should calm down. "This 46% number has barely budged over the past three decades

in recent years disagreement over evolution has become more politically charged, more acrimonious, and that the rancor may be affecting other science-related policy areas, such as climate change.

fundamentalist Christians, upon being maligned by know-it-all Darwinians, are starting to see secular scientists more broadly as the enemy; Darwinians, climate scientists, and stem cell researchers start to seem like a single, menacing blur.

Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping.

Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.

Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.

A recent study shows differences in brain structure according to how trusting people are of others.

They also were shown pictures of faces with neutral facial expressions and asked to evaluate how trustworthy they found each person in the picture. This gave researchers a metric, on a spectrum, of how trusting each participant was of others.

MRI scans of the participants' brains to determine how brain structure is associated with the tendency to be more trusting of others. What they found were differences in two areas of the brain.

According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.

Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream.

What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

Alan Brody explains Plato’s/Socrates’ understanding of habitually bad behavior.

the condition is capable of creating urges and motivations which bring about highly significant losses to a person’s well-being in spite of the person’s standing preference not to live like that.

It’s common to change one’s mind when faced with temptation. Sometimes the choice to go ahead with the temptation is the result of a cost-benefit evaluation – in other words, it seems worthwhile to do it. At other times a person might gratify their desire or urge without entertaining any qualms or even thoughts about it. So although an addict’s habitual behavior might be atypical, rather than seeing it as a result of a compulsion they’re not strong enough to fight against, why not see their addictive behavior as something done in a willing manner, because the person feels like doing it, and/or they regard it as worth doing?

I think it’s great when rich people do good things with their money. I think it’s appalling that we need them to. To put it bluntly, the money that the Brins and Bloombergs have to shower down on a fortunate few—that money, and a great deal more besides—should be taxed away and allocated by democratic means.

the problem goes beyond taxation. Markets allocate resources, but governments structure markets. Never mind that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes. (And as we know, it isn’t even that they don’t pay more than the rest of us. In a lot of cases, they pay a great deal less.) They shouldn’t be in a position to make that kind of money in the first place.

You want to tell me that they earned it? Earned is a moral term. How do you measure the share of the money that somebody gets that they actually “earn”? From 1978 to 2011, the average worker’s pay went up by 6 percent. The average compensation of a CEO went up by 727 percent. Do you really believe that executives earned a raise that’s 120 times greater than their workers did?

Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts. She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group. But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

selfie sticks, the latest and most obnoxious tool in the kit of digital narcissism.

viewing the world through a selfie stick is like skiing in that artificial snow park in Dubai. It further isolates and cocoons the visitor inside a zone of self-projected experience.

these elongated facial recorders are all the rage among travelers. “Like it or not,” a recent post on BuzzFeed reported, “everyone is going to be wielding a selfie stick.”

If you took your cues from the political rhetoric in Washington — or even from the occasional virulent debate in the economics blogosphere — you would think the whole question of fiscal stimulus is highly contested.But it’s not. There’s widespread agreement among economists that the stimulus act has helped boost the economy.

The Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago — hardly a hotbed of liberal or Keynesian thought — regularly surveys a number of the leading American economists about a variety of policy issues.

Recently each of these eminent economists was asked whether the unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill. Of the 44 economists surveyed, 37 responded, yielding a healthy response rate of 84 percent. Among those who responded, 36 agreed that the stimulus bill had lowered the unemployment rate, while one disagreed

before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.

class interests also operate through a cruder, more direct channel. Quite simply, easy-money policies, while they may help the economy as a whole, are directly detrimental to people who get a lot of their income from bonds and other interest-paying assets — and this mainly means the very wealthy, in particular the top 0.01 percent.

there’s also a much more direct reason for those defending the interests of the wealthy to complain about easy money: The wealthy derive an important part of their income from interest on bonds, and low-rate policies have greatly reduced this income.

mental faculties that improve with age.

Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence.

the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought.

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.

Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.

The visual system optimally maintains attention on relevant objects even as eye movements are made, shows a study by the German Primate Center.

Their study shows that the rhesus macaque's brain quickly and efficiently shifts attention with each eye-movement in a well-synchronized manner. Since humans and monkeys exhibit very similar eye-movements and visual function, these findings are likely to generalize to the human brain. These results may help understand disorders like schizophrenia, visual neglect and other attention deficit disorders.

Since different locations on the retina stimulate different visual neurons in the brain, this means that one set of visual neurons responds to the child before the eye-movement, while a different second set of neurons responds to the child after the eye-movement. Thus, to optimally maintain attention on the child, the brain has to enhance the responses of the first set of neurons right until the eye-movement begins and then switch to enhance the responses of the second set of neurons right around when the eye-movement ends.

Maurice stumbles upon what is still the gold standard for the treatment of infantile autism: an intensive course of behavioral therapy called applied behavioral analysis that was developed by psychologist O. Ivar Lovaas at UCLA in the 1970s

in a little over a year’s time she recovers her daughter to the point that she is indistinguishable from her peers.

Let Me Hear Your Voice is not a particularly religious or pious work. It is not the story of a miracle or a faith healing

At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.

But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.

From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.

So, What’s Your ‘Fauxmorbidity’?

People are racing to get vaccinated — even those who don’t yet technically qualify. And that’s good news.

After Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were approved for use in late 2020, anecdotes proliferated about rich people finding ways to jump the distribution priority line.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects working memory as well as short- and long-term memory

People with ADHD struggle with "working memory," a term that used to be interchangeable with "short-term memory."

Long-term memory is essentially a storage bank of information that exists thanks to short-term and working memory.