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Quadriplegics like Scheuermann have manipulated robotic arms using BCI before.

"With three degrees of control, you can do things like manipulate a computer screen and that gentleman was able to reach out and touch his daughter

But to actually manipulate objects, to feed yourself for example, you need more than those three dimensions of control. That's what makes Jan so remarkable

"The biggest change," Boninger said, "is the sophistication with which we've learned to interpret electrical activity in the brain."

"I wouldn't say we have decoded the brain," Boninger said. "But we are getting closer. We can't read emotions but we can interpret motions the brain wants the body to make."

"For me, it's been one of the most exciting endeavors I have ever undertaken," Sheuermann wrote on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center blog. "Being with a team of scientists and using cutting-edge technology that makes me the only person in the world who can scratch her nose with a robotic arm, well, that's thrilling."

Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern

her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.

if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.

The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think. Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling.

emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist

Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group,

a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.

It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.

“What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology

Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.

“Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”

Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented themselves.

gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings

researchers question whether dogs experience feelings like love and loyalty, or whether their winning ways are just a matter of instincts that evolved because being a hanger-on is an easier way to make a living than running down elk.

dogs and wolves interbreed easily and some scientists are not convinced that the two are even different species

generally agree that there is good evidence that dogs were domesticated around 15,000 years ago

“Maybe dog domestication on some level kicks off this whole change in the way that humans are involved and responding to and interacting with their environment,

most dog breeds were invented in the 19th century during a period of dog obsession that he called “the giant whirlwind blender of the European crazy Victorian dog-breeding frenzy.

“There’s hardly a person working in canine genetics that’s not working on that project

Almost every group has a different origination hypothesis

jaws and occasionally nearly complete skulls from old and recent dogs, wolves and canids that could fall into either category.

will be able to determine whether the domestication process occurred closer to 15,000 or 30,000 years ago,

major achievement in the world of canine science, and a landmark in the analysis of ancient DNA to show evolution, migrations and descent,

based on DNA evidence and the shape of ancient skulls, that dog domestication occurred well over 30,000 years ago.

he became fed up with the lack of ancient DNA evidence in papers about the origin of dogs.

identified a skull about 32,000 years old from a Belgian cave in Goyet as an early dog.

arguing that the evidence just wasn’t there to call the Goyet skull a dog,

claims are controversial and is willing, like the rest of the world of canine science, to risk damage to the fossils themselves to get more information on not just the mitochondrial DNA but also the nuclear DNA.

geneticists try to establish is how different the DNA of one animal is from another. Adding ancient DNA gives many more points of reference over a long time span.

will be able to identify changes in the skulls or jaws of those wolves that show shifts to more doglike shapes, helping to narrow the origins of domestication

the project will publish a flagship paper from all of the participants describing their general findings

a group in China was forming with the goal of sequencing 10,000 dog genomes

growing increasingly confident that they will find what they want, and come close to settling the thorny question of when and where the tearing power of a wolf jaw first gave way to the persuasive force of a nudge from a dog’s cold nose.

Secondly, we can turn to neuroscience. Until recently we haven’t been able to look under the skull and see what the brain does when a problem is highly complex. The good news? The brain has a secret weapon against complexity, a process neuroscientists are now calling “insight.” We are learning more everyday about insight’s ability to catch the brain up to complexity—the real antidote to reverting to beliefs as a default.

Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition.

It coordinates something called overt attention – aiming the satellite dishes of the eyes, ears, and nose toward anything important.

Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life

The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum

At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.

All vertebrates—fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. Even lampreys have one, and they appeared so early in evolution that they don’t even have a lower jaw. But as far as anyone knows, the tectum is absent from all invertebrates

According to fossil and genetic evidence, vertebrates evolved around 520 million years ago. The tectum and the central control of attention probably evolved around then, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion when vertebrates were tiny wriggling creatures competing with a vast range of invertebrates in the sea.

The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.

The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement

In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.

With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst. Birds inherited a wulst from their reptile ancestors. Mammals did too, but our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously

The cortex also takes in sensory signals and coordinates movement, but it has a more flexible repertoire. Depending on context, you might look toward, look away, make a sound, do a dance, or simply store the sensory event in memory in case the information is useful for the future.

The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control. The tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important. The cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention. You don’t need to look directly at something to covertly attend to it. Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it

The cortex needs to control that virtual movement, and therefore like any efficient controller it needs an internal model. Unlike the tectum, which models concrete objects like the eyes and the head, the cortex must model something much more abstract. According to the AST, it does so by constructing an attention schema—a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are

Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence

this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.

I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Evolution is the master of that kind of opportunism. Fins become feet. Gill arches become jaws. And self-models become models of others. In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.

In the AST’s evolutionary story, social cognition begins to ramp up shortly after the reptilian wulst evolved. Crocodiles may not be the most socially complex creatures on earth, but they live in large communities, care for their young, and can make loyal if somewhat dangerous pets.

If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us.

t the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.

Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes

Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD

the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.

“Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative.” The idea is to leverage human technology for the benefit of animals for a change.

The star attraction, arguably, is GPS for birds.

Keats is suggesting specially-designed shell coverings boasting urban colors and visual patterns to help them avoid notice.

The metaphors affected how the students saw the problem, and how they proposed to fix it.

So metaphors can influence opinions and choices, but how strong are their effects really? At the end of their experiments, Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked the students to state their gender and political affiliation. As you might expect, men and Republicans were more likely to emphasise enforcement, while women and Democrats leant towards social reforms. But these factors only created differences of around 8 to 9 percentage points. The metaphors, on the other hand, created shifts of between 18 to 22 percentage points!

it’s virtually impossible to talk about complex issues like crime, the economy, health and so on, without resorting to metaphors.

bad metaphors can do a great disservice to the public understanding of science. The idea of the “evolutionary ladder” perpetuates the myth that evolution is about a steady linear march towards complexity.

beauty is very much about familiarity and it’s reinforcing an idea we have already. It’s like when we go on holiday, all we really want to do is take the photograph that we’ve seen in the brochure. Because our idea of beauty is constructed, by family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion, politics, all these things

I have found the 21st-century version of the Venetian secret and it is a mathematical formula. What you do, you get a half-decent, non-offensive kind of idea, then you times it by the number of studio assistants, and then you divide it with an ambitious art dealer, and that equals number of oligarchs and hedge fund managers in the world.

the nearest we have to an empirical measure of art that actually does exist is the market. By that reckoning, Cézanne’s “Card Players” is the most beautiful lovely painting in the world. I find it a little bit clunky-kitsch but that’s me. It’s worth $260m.

The opposite arguments are that it’s art for art’s sake and that’s a very idealistic position to take. Clement Greenberg, a famous art critic in the 1950s, said that art will always be tied to money by an umbilical cord of gold, either state money or market money. I’m pragmatic about it: one of my favourite quotes is you’ll never have a good art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.

there’s one thing about that red painting that ends up in Sotheby’s. It’s not just any old red painting. It is a painting that has been validated. This is an important word in the art world and the big question is: who validates? There is quite a cast of characters in this validation chorus that will kind of decide what is good art. They are a kind of panel, if you like, that decides on what is good quality, what are we going to end up looking at?

They include artists, teachers, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, the media, even the public maybe. And they form this lovely consensus around what is good art.

there were four stages to the rise of an artist. Peers, serious critics and collectors, dealers, then the public.

Another member of that cast of validating characters is the collectors. In the 1990s, if Charles Saatchi just put his foot over the threshold of your exhibition, that was it. The media was agog and he would come in and Hoover it up. You do want the heavyweight collector to buy your work because that gives it kudos. You don’t want a tacky one who is just buying it to glitz up their hallway.

The next part of this chorus of validation are the dealers. A good dealer brand has a very powerful effect on the reputation of the artist; they form a part of placing the work. This is a slightly mysterious process that many people don’t quite understand but a dealer will choose where your work goes so it gains the brownie points, so the buzz around it goes up.

now, of course, galleries like the Tate Modern want a big name because visitor numbers, in a way, are another empirical measure of quality. So perhaps at the top of the tree of the validation cast are the curators, and in the past century they have probably become the most powerful giver-outers of brownie points in the art world.

ach of the encounters with these members of the cast of validation bestows upon the work, and on the artist, a patina, and what makes that patina is all these hundreds of little conversations and reviews and the good prices over time. These are the filters that pass a work of art through into the canon.

So what does this lovely consensus, that all these people are bestowing on this artwork, that anoints it with the quality that we all want, boil down to? I think in many ways what it boils down to is seriousness. That’s the most valued currency in the art world.

The whole idea of quality now seems to be contested, as if you’re buying into the language of the elite by saying, “Oh, that’s very good.” How you might judge this work is really problematic because to say it’s not beautiful is to put the wrong kind of criteria on it. You might say, “Oh, it’s dull!” [And people will say] “Oh, you’re just not understanding it with the right terms.” So I think, “Well, how do we judge these things?” Because a lot of them are quite politicised. There’s quite a right-on element to them, so do we judge them on how ethical they are, or how politically right-on they are?

What I am attempting to explain is how the art we see in museums and in galleries around the world, and in biennales – how it ends up there, how it gets chosen. In the end, if enough of the right people think it’s good, that’s all there is to it. But, as Alan Bennett said when he was a trustee of the National Gallery, they should put a big sign up outside saying: “You don’t have to like it all.”

Or then again I might say, “Well, what do I judge them against?” Do I judge them against government policy? Do I judge them against reality TV? Because that does participation very well. So, in the end, what do we do? What happens to this sort of art when it doesn’t have validation? What is it left with? It’s left with popularity.

Then, of course, the next group of people we might think about in deciding what is good art is the public. Since the mid-1990s, art has got a lot more media attention. But popularity has always been a quite dodgy quality [to have]. The highbrow critics will say, “Oh, he’s a bit of a celebrity,” and they turn their noses up about people who are well known to the public

The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.

aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.

Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.

We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,

No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”

“We’re forgetting how to fly.”

The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.

What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer

That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.

A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.

when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.

Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears

Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.

Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.

Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.

When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit

What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.

In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.

You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.

Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge

Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?

The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.

That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.

conundrum of computer automation.

Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.

People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at

people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”

a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.

You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.

What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.

most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.

Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.

Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.

The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.

, Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.

The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.

But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.

The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.

An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it

A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.

Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?

Scientists think the brain's prefrontal cortex processes experiences, using sensory input from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, sorts them into categories, and tags the various memory fragments with specific associations (smells of home, friends from camp, bugs, a pet, for example). When a memory cue comes in, the brain searches its circuits for related fragments and assembles them like a jigsaw puzzle. Some fragments bring associated fragments along, which is why one old memory often leads to others. Tastes and smells are particularly evocative

Each time people bring up the same memory, those related fragments and circuits become stronger. "When you are 80 years old, remembering your kindergarten days, it's really the memory of a memory of a memory," says Dr. Devi. That may help explain why children's earliest memories are so unstable: Their neural traces are weak and shallow, whereas the few memories we revisit as we get older lay down stronger traces. Still, because the brain is constantly reassembling the fragments, they are vulnerable to distortion.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.

With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't.

“You see a woman like this and you say, ‘Wow, I want to look like her,’ ” said Reina Parada, as she sanded a mannequin torso in the workshop. Although she cannot afford it, she said, she would like to get implant surgery someday. “It gives you better self-esteem.”

Cosmetic procedures are so fashionable here that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as “an operated woman.” Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being “operated” as well.

The embrace of plastic surgery clashes with the government’s socialist ideology and frequent talk of creating a society free of the taint of commercialism.

the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.

“Venezuela is known for its oil, and it’s known for its beauty,”

Beauty took on a particularly important role in the late 1970s and ’80s when the country’s beauty queens, already a national obsession, were crowned Miss Universe three times.

And the beauty queens’ fame helped fuel a fascination with cosmetic surgery and procedures like breast implants, tummy tucks, nose jobs and injections to firm the buttocks.

For Mr. Sousa, beauty really is skin deep: “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”

It was found that the dogs were able to select faces more often than what would be expected as random chance

not only were the dogs able to identify emotions in human faces but were able to transfer what they have learned to identify emotions in new faces.

"Our study demonstrates that dogs can distinguish angry and happy expressions in humans, they can tell that these two expressions have different meanings, and they can do this not only for people they know well, but even for faces they have never seen before,".

Over the last twenty years a large number of philosophical dictionaries, handbooks and companions/study guides have sprang up. These can be both incredibly useful and very entertaining. Three of my favourites are the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind edited by Samuel Guttenplan; the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy by Simon Blackburn; and the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Zalta. Indulge yourself.

there’s an overwhelming preference amongst philosophers for red wine and coffee.

There are very few intellectual endeavours into which the philosopher cannot productively stick her nose. All the natural and social sciences provide fertile ground for philosophy; as do the arts, literature, politics, history and current affairs

philosophers don’t sit around shooting the breeze. It’s hard work finding a good argument. It takes practise to become skilled at judging the degree of support the premises and steps of an argument provide for the conclusion. Familiarizing yourself with the arguments of the great philosophers of the past is an excellent way to get the requisite practise.

Arguments – rational derivations of conclusions from premises – are central to philosophy. But arguments in another sense – vigorous interchanges of ideas, either verbally or in writing – are also very common in philosophy.

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