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‘Well, I’m not an engineer, but I think the bridge will stand up.’  ”

“Not just as a public figure, but as a human being, your fidelity should be to reality and to the truth,”

Among those agreeing that climate change is both real and a man-made threat are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the Defense Department, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society

giving parents a “measure of choice” on vaccination is “the balance that government has to decide.”

murkiness of those comments caused alarm among public-health officials, who say the impact of the anti-vaccination movement is being seen in a measles outbreak in a number of states and Washington, D.C.

Climate change also sparks tension.

He said he was galled by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s recent assertion that the government should not require parents to vaccinate their children because it’s an issue of “freedom.”

As for the caveat I’m not a scientist, “What they’re saying they implicitly think is that scientists don’t even know about climate change,”

However, Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul all voted against another amendment that said human activity contributes “significantly” to the threat. Cruz has asserted to the National Journal that climate change is “a theory that can’t be proven or disproven.”

In a separate vote, 98 senators — including Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul — acknowledged that climate change is “real and not a hoax.”

The group that denied climate change is occurring has pivoted, acknowledging that it exists. Still, the group questions whether it is a man-made phenomenon.

“There is an unwritten litmus test for GOP officeholders” to express some form of skepticism about the phenomenon, he said.

Conservatives felt more negative emotions when they read scientific studies that challenged their views on climate change and evolution than liberals did in reading about nuclear power and fracking, but researchers believe that’s because climate change and evolution are more national in scope than the issues picked for liberals.

“The point is, to a very high level, scientists do know.”

didn’t stop 39 Republicans — including GOP presidential contenders Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — from opposing an amendment last month that blamed changing global temperatures on human activity.

He said the disconnect between the public and scientists isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Such a slowdown “gives the science time to mature on some of these issues.”

most would-be candidates want to appeal to as many people as possible.

“And if you can sort of try to obscure your actual position but not offend anyone, that’s what I think they try to do,”

But it’s possible that their comments reflect a growing disconnect between the views of the public and the scientific community.

86 percent of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said childhood vaccines such as the one for measles-mumps-rubella should be required, 68 percent of U.S. adults agreed.

larger gap on the subject of climate change: 87 percent of the scientists said climate change is caused mostly by human activity, while 50 percent of U.S. adults did.

The divide is not necessarily a conservative one

For example, while 88 percent of scientists said it is generally safe to eat genetically modified foods, only 37 percent of U.S. adults agreed.

And the vaccine issue is one that has united some liberals, the religious right and libertarians.

The study found that conservatives tend to distrust science on issues such as climate change and evolution. For liberals, it is fracking and nuclear power.

Even those who agree that climate change is real and is man-made might not support government action

liberals showed some distrust about science when they read about climate change and evolution

“Liberals can be just as biased as conservatives,” he said.

Rosenberg said the Internet can provide affirmation of pre-existing beliefs rather than encouraging people to find objective sources of information, such as peer-reviewed journals.

Often, attacking science is the easiest way to justify inaction, Rosenberg said.

The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.

A year ago, German scientists argued that cognitive “deficits” in aging were caused largely by the accumulation of knowledge — that is, the brain slows down because it has to search a larger mental library of facts

Experts said the new analysis raised a different question: Are there distinct, independent elements of memory and cognition that peak at varying times of life?

The strength of the new analysis is partly in its data. The study evaluated historic scores from the popular Wechsler intelligence test, and compared them with more recent results from tens of thousands of people who took short cognitive tests on the authors’ websites, testmybrain.org and gameswithwords.org

The one drawback of this approach is that, because it didn’t follow the same people over a lifetime, it might have missed the effect of different cultural experiences

most previous studies have not been nearly as large, or had such a range of ages. Participants on the websites were 10 to 89 years old, and they took a large battery of tests, measuring skills like memory for abstract symbols and strings of digits, problem solving, and facility reading emotions from strangers’ eyes.

“We found different abilities really maturing or ripening at different ages,” Dr. Germine said. “It’s a much richer picture of the life span than just calling it aging.”

At least as important, the researchers looked at the effect of age on each type of test.

Processing speed — the quickness with which someone can manipulate digits, words or images, as if on a mental sketch board — generally peaks in the late teens

memory for some things, like names, does so in the early 20s

But the capacity of that sketch board, called working memory, peaks at least a decade later and is slow to decline. In particular, the ability to recall faces and do some mental manipulation of numbers peaked about age 30,

The researchers also analyzed results from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. The test involves looking at snapshots of strangers’ eyes on a computer screen and determining their moods from a menu of options like “tentative,” “uncertain” and “skeptical.”

people in their 40s or 50s consistently did the best, the study found, and the skill declined very slowly later in life

The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others.

for now, the new research at least gives some meaning to the empty adjective “wily.”

The brain-development lag has huge implications for how we think about anxiety and how we treat it. It suggests that anxious adolescents may not be very responsive to psychotherapy that attempts to teach them to be unafraid, like cognitive behavior therapy

should also make us think twice — and then some — about the ever rising use of stimulants in young people, because these drugs may worsen anxiety and make it harder for teenagers to do what they are developmentally supposed to do: learn to be unafraid when it is appropriate

up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences.

This isn’t to say that cognitive therapy is ineffective for teenagers, but that because of their relative difficulty in learning to be unafraid, it may not be the most effective treatment when used on its own.

Fear learning lies at the heart of anxiety and anxiety disorders. This primitive form of learning allows us to form associations between events and specific cues and environments that may predict danger.

once previously threatening cues or situations become safe, we have to be able to re-evaluate them and suppress our learned fear associations. People with anxiety disorders have trouble doing this and experience persistent fear in the absence of threat — better known as anxiety.

Dr. Casey discovered that adolescents had a much harder time “unlearning” the link between the colored square and the noise than children or adults did.

adolescents had trouble learning that a cue that was previously linked to something aversive was now neutral and “safe.” If you consider that adolescence is a time of exploration when young people develop greater autonomy, an enhanced capacity for fear and a more tenacious memory for threatening situations are adaptive and would confer survival advantage. In fact, the developmental gap between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that is described in humans has been found across mammalian species, suggesting that this is an evolutionary advantage.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve treated many adults with various anxiety disorders, nearly all of whom trace the origin of the problem to their teenage years. They typically report an uneventful childhood rudely interrupted by adolescent anxiety. For many, the anxiety was inexplicable and came out of nowhere.

prescription sales for stimulants increased more than fivefold between 2002 and 2012. This is of potential concern because it is well known from both human and animal studies that stimulants enhance learning and, in particular, fear conditioning.

At sea or in the wilderness, these friends managed to escape both from the institutions of patriarchy and from the intimate authority of women, the mothers and wives who represent a check on male freedom.

What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable.

From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library.”

“The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”

What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world.

we’ve also witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used to be portrayed in the formerly tried-and-true genres of the urban cop show, the living-room or workplace sitcom and the prime-time soap opera. Instead, we are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters of Sex” (a prehistory of the end of patriarchy), “Bob’s Burgers” (a loopy post-"Simpsons” family cartoon) and a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based web videos.

we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction.

The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of semi-antiheroes

We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”

Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys and other readily available symbols of settled male authority?

That was only half the story, though. As before, the rebellious animus of the disaffected man-child was directed not just against male authority but also against women. I

their refusal of maturity also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of the studio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money.

The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths and reveling in its pleasures.

These past studies of exercise and neurogenesis understandably have focused on distance running. Lab rodents know how to run. But whether other forms of exercise likewise prompt increases in neurogenesis has been unknown and is an issue of increasing interest

new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Physiology, researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and other institutions gathered a large group of adult male rats. The researchers injected the rats with a substance that marks new brain cells and then set groups of them to an array of different workouts, with one group remaining sedentary to serve as controls.

They found very different levels of neurogenesis, depending on how each animal had exercised. Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue teemed with new neurons, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals. The greater the distance that a runner had covered during the experiment, the more new cells its brain now contained. There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of the animals that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but far less than in the distance runners. And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all.

“sustained aerobic exercise might be most beneficial for brain health also in humans.”

Just why distance running was so much more potent at promoting neurogenesis than the other workouts is not clear, although Dr. Nokia and her colleagues speculate that distance running stimulates the release of a particular substance in the brain known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor that is known to regulate neurogenesis. The more miles an animal runs, the more B.D.N.F. it produces. Weight training, on the other hand, while extremely beneficial for muscular health, has previously been shown to have little effect on the body’s levels of B.D.N.F.

As for high-intensity interval training, its potential brain benefits may be undercut by its very intensity, Dr. Nokia said. It is, by intent, much more physiologically draining and stressful than moderate running, and “stress tends to decrease adult hippocampal neurogenesis,” she said.

These results do not mean, however, that only running and similar moderate endurance workouts strengthen the brain, Dr. Nokia said. Those activities do seem to prompt the most neurogenesis in the hippocampus. But weight training and high-intensity intervals probably lead to different types of changes elsewhere in the brain. They might, for instance, encourage the creation of additional blood vessels or new connections between brain cells or between different parts of the brain.

David Marr, a neuroscientist colleague of Chomsky's at MIT, defined a general framework for studying complex biological systems (like the brain) in his influential book Vision,

a complex biological system can be understood at three distinct levels. The first level ("computational level") describes the input and output to the system, which define the task the system is performing. In the case of the visual system, the input might be the image projected on our retina and the output might our brain's identification of the objects present in the image we had observed. The second level ("algorithmic level") describes the procedure by which an input is converted to an output, i.e. how the image on our retina can be processed to achieve the task described by the computational level. Finally, the third level ("implementation level") describes how our own biological hardware of cells implements the procedure described by the algorithmic level.

The emphasis here is on the internal structure of the system that enables it to perform a task, rather than on external association between past behavior of the system and the environment. The goal is to dig into the "black box" that drives the system and describe its inner workings, much like how a computer scientist would explain how a cleverly designed piece of software works and how it can be executed on a desktop computer.

As written today, the history of cognitive science is a story of the unequivocal triumph of an essentially Chomskyian approach over Skinner's behaviorist paradigm -- an achievement commonly referred to as the "cognitive revolution,"

While this may be a relatively accurate depiction in cognitive science and psychology, behaviorist thinking is far from dead in related disciplines. Behaviorist experimental paradigms and associationist explanations for animal behavior are used routinely by neuroscientists

Chomsky critiqued the field of AI for adopting an approach reminiscent of behaviorism, except in more modern, computationally sophisticated form. Chomsky argued that the field's heavy use of statistical techniques to pick regularities in masses of data is unlikely to yield the explanatory insight that science ought to offer. For Chomsky, the "new AI" -- focused on using statistical learning techniques to better mine and predict data -- is unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.

Behaviorist principles of associations could not explain the richness of linguistic knowledge, our endlessly creative use of it, or how quickly children acquire it with only minimal and imperfect exposure to language presented by their environment.

it has been argued in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it -- that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

Implicit in this endeavor is the assumption that with enough sophisticated statistical tools and a large enough collection of data, signals of interest can be weeded it out from the noise in large and poorly understood biological systems.

Brenner, a contemporary of Chomsky who also participated in the same symposium on AI, was equally skeptical about new systems approaches to understanding the brain. When describing an up-and-coming systems approach to mapping brain circuits called Connectomics, which seeks to map the wiring of all neurons in the brain (i.e. diagramming which nerve cells are connected to others), Brenner called it a "form of insanity."

These debates raise an old and general question in the philosophy of science: What makes a satisfying scientific theory or explanation, and how ought success be defined for science?

Ever since Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, it has become a favorite pastime of academics to place various thinkers and scientists on the "Hedgehog-Fox" continuum: the Hedgehog, a meticulous and specialized worker, driven by incremental progress in a clearly defined field versus the Fox, a flashier, ideas-driven thinker who jumps from question to question, ignoring field boundaries and applying his or her skills where they seem applicable.

Chomsky's work has had tremendous influence on a variety of fields outside his own, including computer science and philosophy, and he has not shied away from discussing and critiquing the influence of these ideas, making him a particularly interesting person to interview.

If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they're broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics -- greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

If a molecule is too big, you give it to the chemists. The chemists, for them, if the molecule is too big or the system gets too big, you give it to the biologists. And if it gets too big for them, they give it to the psychologists, and finally it ends up in the hands of the literary critic, and so on.

An unlikely pair, systems biology and artificial intelligence both face the same fundamental task of reverse-engineering a highly complex system whose inner workings are largely a mystery

neuroscience developed kind of enthralled to associationism and related views of the way humans and animals work. And as a result they've been looking for things that have the properties of associationist psychology.

with a little maturity, they’re less likely by middle age to be blinded by ego, more likely to know what it is they actually desire, more likely to get out of their own way, and maybe a little less likely, given all the judgments that have been made, to care about what other people think.

They achieve a kind of tranquillity, not because they’ve decided to do nothing, but because they’ve achieved focus and purity of will. They have enough self-confidence, and impatience, to say no to some things so they can say yes to others.

Peterson deserves a full, appropriately complex accounting of his best and worst arguments; I intend to give him one soon. For now, I can only tell you how the Peterson phenomenon manifested one night in Aspen

“For the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and there are no barriers to entry. That’s a Gutenberg revolution,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a game changer. The podcast world is also a Gutenberg moment but it’s even more extensive. The problem with books is that you can’t do anything else while you’re reading. But if you’re listening to a podcast you can be driving a tractor or a long haul truck or doing the dishes. So podcasts free up two hours a day for people to engage in educational activity they otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in. That’s one-eighth of people’s lives. You’re handing people a lot of time back to engage in high-level intellectual education.

that technological revolution has revealed something good that we didn’t know before: “The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are. And people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue.”

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start until you’re like in your mid 20s. So I knew universities were underserving the broader community a long time ago. But there wasn’t a mechanism whereby that could be rectified.

Universities are beyond forgiveness, he argued, because due to the growing ranks of administrators, there’s been a radical increase in tuition. “Unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four year period at the cost of mortgaging their future in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy,” he complained. “So it’s essentially a form of indentured servitude. There’s no excuse for that … That cripples the economy because the students become overlaid with debt that they’ll never pay off at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. That’s absolutely appalling.”

A critique I frequently hear from Peterson’s critics is that everything he says is either obvious or wrong. I think that critique fails insofar as I sometimes see some critics calling one of his statements obvious even as others insist it is obviously wrong.

a reliable difference among men and women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now what's the evidence for that? Here's one piece of evidence: There are 10 times as many men in prison. Now is that a sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay?

Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot, and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there are reasons for that, and that's cross-cultural as well. Now men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means. So now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women? The answer is not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true. This is where you have to know something about statistics to understand the way the world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presuppositions to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric.

So if you draw two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you'd win 40 percent of the time. That's quite a lot. It isn't 50 percent of the time which would be no differences. But it’s a lot. There are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. There's way more similarity than difference. And this is along the dimension where there's the most difference. But here's the problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. Then the distributions move off to the side. And then all the action is at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What people care about is who is the most aggressive person out of 100, because that's the person you'd better watch out for.

Whenever I'm interviewed by journalists who have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the world in any other manner. The political is a tiny fraction of the world. And what I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological or theological. The political element is peripheral. And if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident

In a New York Times article titled, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” the writer Nellie Bowles quoted her subject as follows:

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

Ever since, some Peterson critics have claimed that Peterson wants to force women to have sex with male incels, or something similarly dystopian.

...it's an anthropological truism generated primarily through scholars on the left, just so everybody is clear about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every human society that ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy. It's like ‘Oh my God, how contentious can you get.’ Well, how many of you are in monogamous relationships? A majority. How is that enforced?...

If everyone you talk to is boring it’s not them! And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, if you’re heterosexual, then you're wrong, they're not wrong, and you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult work to do. And there isn't anything I've been telling young men that's clearer than that … What I've been telling people is take the responsibility for failure onto yourself. That's a hint that you've got work to do. It could also be a hint that you're young and useless and why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer. And that's rectifiable. Maturity helps to rectify that.

And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go two standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That's why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison.  

Weiss: You are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a student come to you and say, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want you to call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?

Peterson: Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable, and a way that is manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and acceptable then I would have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance. And you might think, ‘Well, who am I to judge?’ Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And I'm responsible for judging how I am going to use my words. I'd judge the same way I judge all my interactions with people, which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring. I live with the consequences and I'm willing to accept the responsibility.

But also to be clear about this, it never happened––I never refused to call anyone by anything they had asked me to call them by, although that's been reported multiple times. It's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I'm concerned.

type one and type two error problem

note what his avowed position is: that he has never refused to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, that he has done so many times, that he would always try to err on the side of believing a request to be earnest, and that he reserves the right to decline a request he believes to be in bad faith. Whether one finds that to be reasonable or needlessly difficult, it seems irresponsible to tell trans people that a prominent intellectual hates them or is deeply antagonistic to them when the only seeming conflict is utterly hypothetical and ostensibly not even directed against people that Peterson believes to be trans, but only against people whom he does not believe to be trans

What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.

Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.

psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.

Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.

Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.

While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.

“Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”

it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.

Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.

As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.

Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”

B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.

“No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”

the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.

As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.

UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.

the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.

“We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”

Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use

Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications

moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?

Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”

the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”

Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”

Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.

Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked

A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.

“The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”

Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.

Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.

one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”

The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”

These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.

The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.

Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”

After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system

“If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”

This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.

Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.

“Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”

Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention

Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.

But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.

younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.

Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones

U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.

Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.

Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school

teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping

kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.

many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful

persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments

A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.

And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.

The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.

as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids

Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.

While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school

it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.

Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.

The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.

Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives

Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”

Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”

“If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”

Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.

Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.

How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.

Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”

the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter

APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests

Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.

“Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”

Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds

Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids

similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.

in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”

I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”

The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness

Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.

Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.

It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated

The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.

But somehow as people pragmatically “select” each other, marriage as an institution has gone into crisis. Marriage rates have plummeted at every age level. Most children born to women under 30 are born outside of wedlock. The choice mind-set seems to be self-defeating.

see a different set of attitudes and presuppositions, which you might call a Regime of Covenants. A covenant is not a choice, but a life-altering promise and all the binding the promise entails.

The Regime of Covenants acknowledges the fact that we don’t really choose our most important attachments the way you choose a toaster. In the flux of life you meet some breathtakingly amazing people, usually in the swirl of complex circumstances. There is a sense of being blown around by currents more astounding than you can predict and control

When you are drawn together and make a pledge with a person, the swirl doesn’t end; it’s just that you’ll ride it together. In the Regime of Covenants, making the right one-time selection is less important than the ongoing action to serve the relationship.

The Covenant people tend to have a “we” consciousness. The good of the relationship itself comes first and the needs of the partner are second and the individual needs are third. The covenant only works if each partner, as best as possible, puts the other’s needs above his or her own, with the understanding that the other will reciprocate.

The underlying truth of a Covenantal Regime is that you have to close off choice if you want to get to the promised land. The people one sees in long, successful marriages have walked the stations of vulnerability. They’ve overthrown the proud ego and learned to be utterly dependent on the other.

You only do all this if you’ve set up a framework in which exit is not an easy option, in which you’re assured the other person’s love is not going away, and in which the only way to survive the crises is to go deeper into the relationship itself.

The final feature of a covenant is that the relationship is not just about itself; it serves some larger purpose. The obvious one in many cases is raising children. But the deeper one is transformation. People in such a covenant try to love the other in a way that brings out their loveliness.

The Covenant Regime is based on the idea that our current formula is a conspiracy to make people unhappy. Love is realistically a stronger force than self-interest. Detached calculation in such matters is self-strangulating. The deepest joy sneaks in the back door when you are surrendering to some sacred promise.

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe in their Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2010) state that such wisdom is greatly needed

The authors quote Aristotle and give the example of a man practicing practical wisdom and mention that “he had the self-control—the emotion-regulating skills—to choose rightly.”

Psychologist, futurist, and editor of The Wisdom Page Tom Lombardo also stresses the importance of temperance and self-control. In his new book on Future Consciousness

he includes a whole chapter (of 45 pages) on “Self-Control and Self-Responsibility.” In it he cites favorably two authors who claim that “most human problems are due to a lack of self-control.” He also states that “we cannot flourish without self-responsibility, self-control, and . . . . one of the most unethical forms of thinking and behavior in life . . . is to abdicate self-responsibility and self-control in ourselves.”

In Inside Obama’s Brain (2009), journalist Sasha Abramsky talked to over a hundred people who knew Obama and reported that “during the election campaign Obama almost never got upset, or panicked, by day-to-day shifts in momentum, by the ups and downs of opinion polls.” Almost a year into his presidency, Abramsky refered to the president as “a voice of moderation in a corrosively shrill, partisan political milieu.”

Up until the end of his presidency, Obama maintained his self-control and temperance. As a Huffington Post piece noted in 2016, he “has been the model of temperance in office on all fronts.”

Just as many individuals have commented on Obama’s self-discipline and temperance, so too have many remarked on Trump’s lack of these virtues

In May 2017, Brooks stated: “At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.”

Two months later, Douthat opined about Trump: “He is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. . . . This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.”

Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, insisted that Trump “lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president.”

At about the same time former Republican senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) declared “The question is, does he have the self-discipline and some control over his ego to be able to say ‘I’m wrong’ every now and then? I haven’t seen that.

it is Trump’s narcissism and lack of humility that are his chief faults and hinder him most from being even a mediocre president.

When I graduated from college there was a finite number of career ladders in front of me: teacher, lawyer, doctor, business. Now college graduates enter a world with four million footstools. There are many more places to perch (a start-up, an NGO, a coffee shop, a consultancy) but few of the footstools pay a sustaining wage, seem connected with the others or lead to a clear ladder of rungs to climb upward.

People in their 20s seem to be compelled to bounce around more, popping up here and there, quantumlike, with different jobs, living arrangements and partners while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something.

Naturally enough, their descriptions of their lives are rife with uncertainty and anxiety

All the while social media makes the comparison game more intrusive than ever, and nearly everybody feels as if he or she is falling behind.

And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase? We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless

we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found by getting in touch with your “true self,” whatever the heck that is.

Now I think that laissez-faire attitude trivializes the experiences of young adulthood and condescends to the people going through them.

telling people “30 is the new 20” is completely counterproductive.

colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table, to help students grapple with the coming decade of uncertainty: What does it mean to be an adult today? What are seven or 10 ways people have found purpose in life? How big should I dream or how realistic should I be? What are the criteria we should think about before shacking up? What is the cure for sadness? What do I want and what is truly worth wanting?

Before, there were social structures that could guide young adults as they gradually figured out the big questions of life. Now, those structures are gone. Young people are confronted by the existential questions right away. They’re going to feel lost if they have no sense of what they’re pointing toward, if they have no vision of the holy grails on the distant shore.

How did it go? I was absolutely miserable dating appropriate-age marketing associates who lived near me. I always wanted to be at home reading instead

Then one night I held a reading with some authors I admire at a bookstore, and I threw an after-party at my favorite dive bar. In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now. (He likes David Foster Wallace.)

The internet is supposed to make it easier for us to find people and places and perfect gifts, and more profitable for companies that offer those services. And yet here I am, with my too-old dog and my too-young husband and my ever-growing book collection, happier than I could have predicted.

It’s risky not to have data, to be without numbers you can plug in when you’re looking for something or someone to love. We think we know exactly what we want. But I hope that our guts remain true to our hearts, and in this world measured by clicks and stars and highest customer reviews, we remember that some rules are made to be broken in the most delightful of ways.

Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.

Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use

Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,

“Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

“Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”

As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.

Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty

It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news

“When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.

Technology Is Never Neutral

As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.

The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.

This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.

with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”

Is There Any Solution?

Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.

Politics as Entertainment

“How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment

In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.

The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.

This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa

Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.

Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.

Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”

does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?

Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”

Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.

Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship

Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.

We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.

forgetting seems to be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain.

“To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.

Different types of memory are created and stored in varying ways, and in various areas of the brain.

Neurons communicate with each other through synapses — junctions between these cells that include a tiny gap across which chemical messengers can be sent

The more often a memory is recalled, the stronger its neural network becomes. Over time, and through consistent recall, the memory becomes encoded in both the hippocampus and the cortex

Because the hippocampus is not where long-term memories are stored in the brain, its dynamic nature is not a flaw but a feature

Neuroscientists often refer to this physical representation of a memory as an engram. They think that each engram has a number of synaptic connections, sometimes even in several areas of the brain, and that each neuron and synapse can be involved in multiple engrams

The brain is always trying to forget the information it’s already learnt,

Hardt’s lab showed that a dedicated mechanism continuously promotes the expression of AMPA receptors at synapses.

To forget certain things, it seemed that the rat brain had to proactively destroy connections at the synapse. Forgetting, Hardt says, “is not a failure of memory, but a function of it”.

Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, had also found evidence that the brain is wired to forget

Frankland was studying the production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, in adult mice. The process had long been known to occur in the brains of young animals, but had been discovered in the hippocampi of mature animals only about 20 years earlier. Because the hippocampus is involved in memory formation, Frankland and his team wondered whether increasing neurogenesis in adult mice could help the rodents to remember.

Eventually, it exists independently in the cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage.

Researchers think that the human brain might operate in a similar way

Studies of people with exceptional autobiographical memories or with impaired ones seem to bear this out

People with a condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) remember their lives in such incredible detail that they can describe the outfit that they were wearing on any particular day

Those with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), however, are unable to vividly recall specific events in their lives

As a result, they also have trouble imagining what might happen in the future

By better understanding how we forget, through the lenses of both biology and cognitive psychology, Anderson and other researchers might be edging nearer to improving treatments for anxiety, PTSD and even Alzheimer’s disease

Hardt thinks that Alzheimer’s disease might also be better understood as a malfunction of forgetting rather than remembering

But more memory researchers are shifting their focus to examine how the brain forgets, as well as how it remembers

In the past decade, researchers have begun to view forgetting as an important part of a whole

Why do we have memory at all? As humans, we entertain this fantasy that it’s important to have autobiographical details,

Forgetting enables us as individuals, and as a species, to move forwards.

For the sake of everyone who stands to gain from a better knowledge of politics, economics and society, the social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex, reject hypothetico-deductivism and embrace the fact that they are mature disciplines with no need to emulate other sciences.

Or consider the famous “impossibility theorem,” developed by the economist Kenneth Arrow, which shows that no single voting system can simultaneously satisfy several important principles of fairness. There is no need to test this model with data — in fact, there is no way to test it — and yet the result offers policy makers a powerful lesson: there are unavoidable trade-offs in the design of voting systems.

Unfortunately, the belief that every theory must have its empirical support (and vice versa) now constrains the kinds of social science projects that are undertaken, alters the trajectory of academic careers and drives graduate training. Rather than attempt to imitate the hard sciences, social scientists would be better off doing what they do best: thinking deeply about what prompts human beings to behave the way they do.

theoretical models can be of great value even if they are never supported by empirical testing. In the 1950s, for instance, the economist Anthony Downs offered an elegant explanation for why rival political parties might adopt identical platforms during an election campaign. His model relied on the same strategic logic that explains why two competing gas stations or fast-food restaurants locate across the street from each other — if you don’t move to a central location but your opponent does, your opponent will nab those voters (customers). The best move is for competitors to mimic each other. This framework has proven useful to generations of political scientists even though Mr. Downs did not empirically test it and despite the fact that its main prediction, that candidates will take identical positions in elections, is clearly false. The model offered insight into why candidates move toward the center in competitive elections

Likewise, the analysis of empirical data can be valuable even in the absence of a grand theoretical model. Did the welfare reform championed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s reduce poverty? Are teenage employees adversely affected by increases in the minimum wage?

Answering such questions about the effects of public policies does not require sweeping theoretical claims, just careful attention to the data.

theories are like maps: the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere.

Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.

The ideal of hypothetico-deductivism is flawed for many reasons. For one thing,

After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes. This structure is an elite school of sorts for B cells — a boot camp where they become increasingly sophisticated and learn to recognize a diverse set of viral genetic sequences.

The broader the range and the longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to be able to thwart variants of the virus that may emerge.

“Everyone always focuses on the virus evolving — this is showing that the B cells are doing the same thing,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “And it’s going to be protective against ongoing evolution of the virus, which is really encouraging.”

Dr. Ellebedy’s team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 of the participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not declined.

“The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination — that’s a very, very good sign,” Dr. Ellebedy said. Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane.

“Usually by four to six weeks, there’s not much left,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are “still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people.”

The results suggest that a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term — at least, against the existing coronavirus variants

But older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity may need boosters; people who survived Covid-19 and were later immunized may never need them at all.

In the absence of variants that sidestep immunity, in theory immunity could last a lifetime, experts said. But the virus is clearly evolving.

“Anything that would actually require a booster would be variant-based, not based on waning of immunity,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “I just don’t see that happening.”

The good news: A booster vaccine will probably have the same effect as prior infection in immunized people, Dr. Ellebedy said. “If you give them another chance to engage, they will have a massive response,” he said, referring to memory B cells.

Dr. Ellebedy said the results also suggested that these signs of persistent immune reaction might be caused by mRNA vaccines alone, as opposed to those made by more traditional means, like Johnson & Johnson’s

But that is an unfair comparison, because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a single dose, Dr. Iwasaki said: “If the J & J had a booster, maybe it will induce this same kind of response.”

Maybe Shattuck is right and we are all like this -- creatures of language, rather than its masters. Much of what we think we know firsthand we probably picked up from books or newspapers or friends or lovers and never checked against the world at all.

What she knew of her own observation is exactly what we want to know from her. We want to know what it felt like to be Helen Keller. We want to locate the boundaries between what was real to her and what she was forced to imagine. At least in this book, she seems not to have known where that boundary might lie.

Her ability to experience what others felt and heard, she said, illustrated the power of imagination, particularly one that had been developed and extended, as hers was, by books.

He tries to remember what he looks like and discovers that he cannot. He asks: ''To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel that I am mere spirit, a ghost, a memory?''

Keller, in short, matured, both as a person and a writer. She mastered a lesson that relatively few with all their senses have ever mastered, which is to write about what you know.

, was vastly unpopular among political leaders and white Americans at the time of his death. “FBI leadership at that time saw King’s stature as a ‘black messiah’ in criminal terms,” Woodard says, describing how King was “alienated, isolated and eliminated” by the Johnson administration.

Woodard describes how King’s views were becoming more aligned with those of the more radical Malcolm X. “That doesn’t mean that King would have abandoned nonviolent protest,” he says, “but it means that King was increasingly militant in his anti-poverty agenda.”

a ladder of legacies Woodard traces from King through Stokely Carmichael, to whose youthful Black Power movement Woodard imagines King would have added “a core of stability.”

If King had lived, his presumed connection to—or involvement with—today’s polarizing racial justice activists would counter, as Theoharis puts it, America’s “fable that we’ve gotten past the race problem.”

Arguably there is no distinct midlife crisis, just crises that occur during midlife but might equally have occurred before or after.

The key achievement of middle age, according to Jaques, is to move beyond youthful idealism to what he called "contemplative pessimism" and "constructive resignation." He argued midlife was when we reach maturity by overcoming our denial of death and human destructiveness.Carl Jung presented a different view. He argued midlife was a time when previously suppressed aspects of the psyche might become integrated. Men could recover their unconscious feminine side, or anima, previously submerged during their youth, and women come alive to their hidden opposite, the animus.

But there may be something to it that's even more basic and biological. Chimpanzees and orangutans aren't known to suffer from existential dread, empty nest syndrome or job stress. And still, they show the same midlife dip in well-being as their human cousins.One study found chimps in their late 20s and orangutans in the mid-30s showed the lowest mood, the least pleasure in social activities, and the poorest capacity to achieve their goals. The researchers speculated this pattern might reflect age-related changes in brain structures associated with well-being that are similar between primate species.

Consider personality change, for example. One longitudinal study that followed thousands of Americans from age 41 to 50 found they became less neurotic and self-conscious with age. These personality changes were unrelated to the adults' experience of life adversity: resilience, not crisis, was the norm.

Another study that followed a sample of women from age 43 to 52 showed they tended to become less dependent and self-critical, and more confident, responsible and decisive, as they aged. These changes were unrelated to the women's menopausal status or empty nest experiences.

Even the self-reported midlife crises may have a silver lining. One study showed the more crises people reported, the more empathetic they were towards others. It is perhaps unsurprising older adults choose middle adulthood as the phase of life they most prefe