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“We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”

Dr. Tyson implied that President Bush was prejudiced against Islam in order to make a broader point about scientific awareness: Two-thirds of the named stars actually have Arabic names, given to them at a time when Muslims led the world in astronomy — and Mr. Bush might not have said what he did if he had known this fact.This is a powerful example of how our biases can blind us. But not in the way Dr. Tyson thought. Mr. Bush wasn’t blinded by religious bigotry. Instead, Dr. Tyson was fooled by his faith in the accuracy of his own memory.

When he was first asked for the source of Mr. Bush’s quotation, Dr. Tyson insisted, “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.” He then added, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

We recall events easily and often, at least if they are important to us, but only rarely do we find our memories contradicted by evidence, much less take the initiative to check if they are right. We then rely on confidence as a signal of accuracy — in ourselves and in others.

to argue that the female body has the means to "shut that whole thing down," or that the torture of women is somehow divinely sanctioned takes more than just an accident of biology. It takes the ability to speak about things of which you are ignorant as though you are informed. It takes unacknowledged blindness. It takes an appetite for cruelty. 

You might claim to sympathize with the pain experienced by a higher status person, but it's quite likely your jealous brain would actually turn a neural blind eye.

The participants reported that they'd felt equal amounts of empathy and discomfort when the other players underwent the horrible needle treatment, regardless of whether those players were one-star or three-star. But looking at the participants' brain activity told a rather different story.

When they observed photos of an inferior one-star player undergoing the needle injection, their brains showed increased activity in two key brain areas that are known to be involved in feeling pain and in representing the pain of others

Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind.

Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.

Unfortunately for Hahnemann his philosophy—the less of an active ingredient remains the more powerful a remedy is (once you reach 13c on the homeopathic scale there is no longer any active ingredient left)—is nonsense.

This does not stop the irrational stream of unproven (or disproven) therapies arising from the holistic and wellness sphere.

Distrust in one doctor should not imply blind faith in another.

But after seeing ads from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart appear next to racist, anti-Semitic or terrorist videos, its engineers realized their computer models had a blind spot: They did not understand context.

Now teaching computers to understand what humans can readily grasp may be the key to calming fears among big-spending advertisers that their ads have been appearing alongside videos from extremist groups and other offensive messages.

But the recent problems opened Google to criticism that it was not doing enough to look out for advertisers. It is a significant problem for a multibillion-dollar company that still gets most of its revenue through advertising.

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

the critical skills of the best surgeons I saw involved the ability to handle complexity and uncertainty. They had developed judgment, mastery of teamwork, and willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of their choices. In this respect, I realized, surgery turns out to be no different than a life in teaching, public service, business, or almost anything you may decide to pursue. We all face complexity and uncertainty no matter where our path takes us. That means we all face the risk of failure. So along the way, we all are forced to develop these critical capacities—of judgment, teamwork, and acceptance of responsibility.

people admonish us: take risks; be willing to fail. But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks”? We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter. The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology.

there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened up asking why.

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

Nowadays, the veil of ignorance is challenged by a powerful but ancient contender: the veil of opulence. While no serious political philosopher actually defends such a device — the term is my own — the veil of opulence runs thick in our political discourse. Where the veil of ignorance offers a test for fairness from an impersonal, universal point of view — “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?” — the veil of opulence offers a test for fairness from the first-person, partial point of view: “What system would I want if I were so-and-so?”

Those who don the veil of opulence may imagine themselves to be fantastically wealthy movie stars or extremely successful business entrepreneurs. They vote and set policies according to this fantasy. “If I were such and such a wealthy person,” they ask, “how would I feel about giving X percentage of my income, or Y real dollars per year, to pay for services that I will never see nor use?

the veil of opulence operates only under the guise of fairness. It is rather a distortion of fairness, by virtue of the partiality that it smuggles in. It asks not whether a policy is fair given the huge range of advantages or hardships the universe might throw at a person but rather whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others. That is, the veil of opulence insists that people imagine that resources and opportunities and talents are freely available to all, that such goods are widely abundant, that there is no element of randomness or chance that may negatively impact those who struggle to succeed but sadly fail through no fault of their own. It blankets off the obstacles that impede the road to success. It turns a blind eye to the adversity that some people, let’s face it, are born into. By insisting that we consider public policy from the perspective of the most-advantaged, the veil of opulence obscures the vagaries of brute luck.

Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”

The combination of resistance to influence and deflection of responsibility by confessing to one’s advantages is a sure sign of one’s ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus.

Taking things apart, or taking people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel.

New particles may yet be discovered, and even new laws. But it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.

What makes “Mind and Cosmos” worth reading is that Dr. Nagel is an atheist, who rejects the creationist idea of an intelligent designer. The answers, he believes, may still be found through science, but only by expanding it further than it may be willing to go.

“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning,” he wrote, “but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.

but gene therapy may be coming to the rescue. Gene therapy’s success in treating  blindness disorders –many are in late stage trials—gave hope to a field deterred by early missteps. And now gene therapy researchers are expanding their gaze to focus on all manner of sensory diseases.

notable success in using gene therapy techniques to treat a sensory disorder came last year when otolaryngolotist

The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,

much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.

What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.

The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.

He is driven, he says, by his Catholic faith. “I’ve been given benefits from the day I was born,” he says. “A loving family. A great education. So I see it as an obligation, as a Christian and as a human being, to help.”

There also are many, many secular aid workers doing heroic work. But the people I’ve encountered over the years in the most impossible places — like Nuba, where anyone reasonable has fled — are disproportionately unreasonable because of their faith.

Certainly the Nubans (who include Muslims and Christians alike) seem to revere Dr. Tom.