DARPA hopes to do that with an implanted device that will take over some functions of the brain's hippocampus, an area that's important to memory. The agency has already used a device that does this in rodents, Ling said, and the goal is to move on to people quickly.

We believe that the tools and technologies that will come from this initiative will actually enable all brain scientists to do their work better, faster and with more impact,"

For several years now, people with Parkinson's have been able to reduce their tremors with a treatment known as deep brain stimulation.

But Dr. Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said it's important to remember that the immediate goal of the BRAIN Initiative isn't developing treatments, but understanding the inner workings of the most complex system in the universe.

"They're interested in the brain as a way to understand who we are, what makes us different and what is special about the human brain."

What do we mean by motivation? It's been defined as a predisposition to behave in a purposeful manner to achieve specific, unmet needs and the will to achieve, and the inner force that drives individuals to accomplish personal and organizational goals. And why do we need motivated employees? The answer is survival.

It turns out that people are motivated by interesting work, challenge, and increasing responsibility—intrinsic factors. People have a deep-seated need for growth and achievement.

Even understanding what constitutes human motivation  has been a centuries old puzzle, addressed as far back as Aristotle.

. Pink concludes that extrinsic motivators work only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances; rewards often destroy creativity and employee performance; and the secret to high performance isn’t reward and punishment but that unseen intrinsic drive—the drive to do something  because it is meaningful.

true motivation boils down to three elements: Autonomy, the desire to direct our own lives; mastery, the desire to continually improve at something that matters to us, and purpose, the desire to do things in service of something larger than ourselves.

The carrot-and-stick approach worked well for typical tasks of the early 20th century —routine, unchallenging and highly controlled. For these tasks, where the process is straightforward and lateral thinking is not required, rewards can provide a small motivational boost without any harmful side effects

obs in the 21st century have changed dramatically. They have become more complex, more interesting and more self-directed, and this is where the carrot-and-stick approach has become unstuck.

9. You run into a higher total number of people than would have ever been true of our pre-agrarian hominid ancestors.

. You have the option of spending 90% of your waking hours sitting at a desk – and you often exercise this option.

3. You were raised in some variant of a nuclear family – with less assistance from aunts, uncles, older cousins, and grandparents, than would have been typical of our nomadic ancestors.2. You spend a great deal of time interacting with “screens” and “devices” – having the evolutionarily unprecedented possibility of almost never having to be bored at all. 1. You can eat an entire diet of processed foods – and you live in a world where processed foods (think McDonald’s …) are cheaper and more accessible than natural foods.

No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it.

When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.

Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic—or its absence—goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?

he popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are.

Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters.

“This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.”

As a result, we now have a raging national debate, in which serious-minded journalists are asking even more serious-minded politicians and religious scholars if the godless Soviet soldiers killed by American-funded mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties should also be declared martyrs.

“This is a biggie,” said Eric Kandel, the neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate. “Who thinks of the bone as being an endocrine organ? You think of the adrenal gland, you think of the pituitary, you don’t think of bone.”

he most recent finding concerns the skeleton and the brain.

Karsenty showed that bone plays a direct role in memory and mood. Mice whose skeletons did not produce osteocalcin as a result of genetic manipulation were anxious, depressed, and almost completely unable to master a test of spatial memory. When Karsenty infused them with the missing hormone, however, their moods improved and their performance on the memory test became nearly normal. He also found that, in pregnant mice, osteocalcin from the mother’s bones crossed the placenta and helped shape the development of the fetus’s brain. In other words, bones talk to neurons even before birth.

As we age, our bone mass decreases. Memory loss, anxiety, and depression also become more common. These may be separate, unfortunate facts about getting old, but they could also be related.

Even more fantastically: Would it ever be possible to protect memory or treat age-related cognitive decline with a skeletal hormone? These are the kinds of questions that can spur either false hopes or imaginative leaps.

“I don’t know of any hormone that functions in mice but not to some extent in humans,” Thomas Clemens, of Johns Hopkins, told me in 2011

ne tantalizing hint comes from men who are unable to respond to the hormone as a result of a genetic mutation

Karsenty also believes that we know enough now to recognize that the body is far more networked and interconnected than most people think. “No organ is an island,” he likes to say.

“The Dictator’s Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention,” is a compilation of tips, gleaned from the experiences of leaders in China, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and other countries, that illustrate just how brutal the modern, connected world can be for a tyrant.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently said that “this thing called social media is a curse on societies.”

n Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has proved canny online. Blackouts have shut down the Internet at various moments in the past two years

The state news agency blamed one blackout, in May, on “a malfunctioning fibre-optic cable,” but it was not lost on many that it was timed near a vote on a U.N. resolution on Syria.

Does it matter if this is a kind of misinformation? What does a social-media company do when a user known to be attacking civilians is blasting out feel-good content?

But she explained that, generally speaking, if a user created content that promoted violence, Instagram would remove it and possibly disable the user. Schumer stressed the importance of the context of the image in making those calls—a caption might make an image threatening, for instance—but also said that “context” is generally limited to content on the site.

And yet, even within that complex framework, what does it mean to follow a man strongly suggested to be a war criminal, to have a virtual shrine to a dictators’ glory that can fit in our pockets?

“GMO will make Ghanaian farmers poor” and “Our Food Under Our Control!!!”

Monsanto is also part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a group of private corporations tasked by the G8 to invest in solutions to African hunger over the next decade.

Hating Monsanto is “a luxury when you’re surrounded by food 24/7,” writes one defender, who argues that spreading negative sentiment against the company actually “impedes global economic growth.” Even Britain’s Environmental Secretary, Owen Paterson, said organizations fighting the spread of GMOs are “absolutely wicked” and “cast a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world.”

But African farmers also have very legitimate concerns about Monsanto’s reputation for investigating, suing, and ruining farmers who try to save GM seeds.

ood Sovereignty Ghana warns against the “control of our resources by multinational corporations and other foreign entities,” and the “avaricious calculations behind the proposition that food is just another commodity or component for international agribusiness.”

they call for “collective control over our collective resources.”

ontroversial GM golden rice, which is supposed to pump up Vitamin A levels in regular rice to make it more nutritious, could well be a promising use of technology

However, golden rice is still mainly theoretical after a decade of research.

hunger is not caused by a food shortage but by “a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient.”

the notion that minds and bodies exist in separate realms (i.e. Cartesian Dualism) is entirely untenable. 

Our bodies have an address in the first realm, whereas our minds and everything psychological about minds make their home in the second realm.  According to Descartes, these realms are forever separate such that the mind and body cannot influence one another.

We are amazed to learn that when the mind is stressed over time, this can lead the body to break down, producing a variety of physical ailments.  This is amazing to us because we believe stress is of the mind and it is difficult to imagine something of the mind affecting our bodies.  Its hard to believe because it violates our intuitive dualistic understanding of the world.

Are you smart?  Are you kind?  Are you funny?  Are you afraid of being alone?  These two different kinds of questions, focused on body and mind, respectively, rely on different networks within your brain.  When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere (these are called ‘lateral’ regions).  When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other (these are called ‘medial’ regions). 

Knowing that our sense of dualism is just an illusion is very important.  Thomas Mussweiler’s lab recently conducted a study showing that those who have a stronger belief in dualism tend to be less healthy.  Why?  Dualists believe their body is just a shell that is far less important than the mind. 

Of course, the problem with the House of Representatives is not just interactions, because some of its parts (members) have serious ideological defects.

But collaborations can also be demergent, if individuals do not have the intellectual flexibility to build new ideas rather than stick with old ones and waste each other’s time.

The brain is a marvel of emergence. I am currently working on a new theory of consciousness that explains it as the result of three neural mechanisms: representation by patterns of firing in neural populations, binding by neural processes that combine representations into new ones called semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers to represent the most salient aspects of the current situation.

For example the concept of zero cannot be based on perception, but can come about by combining the concepts of quantity and absence.

When brains malfunction, however, they can have demergent properties.

In epilepsy, individual neurons fire appropriately, but the whole brain develops abnormal patterns that can lead to unconsciousness or convulsions.

Figuring out how to have emergence replace demergence is important for neural functioning, and also for effective social functioning.

There are a lot of dangers to magical thinking.

It can lead to fatalism if you think your life is completely controlled by supernatural forces.

But if used carefully, magical thinking can have benefits, such as a sense of control or a sense of meaning in life. So I take this somewhat paradoxical stance of using irrationality rationally.

eling lucky is irrational because the charm or wish itself isn’t lucky. But feeling lucky gives you a sense of control, which increases your confidence and increases your performance in various challenges. So it’s rational to hold onto that irrational belief, on some level, because it can benefit you — even if the charm can’t.

The results were similarly disturbing when students were tested to determine understanding of basic concepts. More instruction wasn't helping students advance from novice to expert. In fact, the data indicated the opposite: students had more novice-like beliefs after they completed a course than they had when they started.

But in addition, experts have a mental organizational structure that facilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge.

experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking ("metacognition"), at least in their discipline of expertise. They are able to ask themselves, "Do I understand this? How can I check my understanding?"

But that is not what cognitive science tells us. It tells us instead that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort.

new ways of thinking are always built on the prior thinking of the individual, so if the educational process is to be successful, it is essential to take that prior thinking into account.

. Everything that constitutes "understanding" science and "thinking scientifically" resides in the long-term memory, which is developed via the construction and assembly of component proteins.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

"So it makes perfect sense," Wieman writes, "that they are not learning to think like experts, even though they are passing science courses by memorizing facts and problem-solving recipes."

Anything one can do to reduce cognitive load improves learning.

A second way teachers can improve instruction is by recognizing the importance of student beliefs about science

My third example of how teaching and learning can be improved is by implementing the principle that effective teaching consists of engaging students, monitoring their thinking, and providing feedback.

I assign students to groups the first day of class (typically three to four students in adjacent seats) and design each lecture around a series of seven to 10 clicker questions that cover the key learning goals for that day.

The process of critiquing each other's ideas in order to arrive at a consensus also enormously improves both their ability to carry on scientific discourse and to test their own understanding. [Change]

Can grammatical gender influence speakers’ cognitive processes when they’re speaking another language entirely?

They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine.

peaking English and using materials written in English

The word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people’s thinking, even when they’re speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of —and even when they’re not speaking any language at all!

Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes

In the parts of the human brain used earlier in the processing stream, regions stimulated by specific features like color, motion, and direction are a major part of the search. However, in the dorsal frontoparietal network, activity is not confined to any specific features of the object.

. By watching the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), located within the dorsal frontoparietal network, the researchers were able to note not only whether their subjects found the objects, but also how confident they were in their finds.

"As you go further up in processing, the neurons are less interested in a specific feature, but they're more interested in whatever is behaviorally relevant to you at the moment,"

The IPS region would be stimulated even if the object was not there, said Eckstein, but the pattern of activity would not be the same as it would had the object actually existed in the scene.

Thus, a search for an apple, for instance, would make red, green, and rounded shapes relevant.

"For visual search to be efficient, we want those visual features related to what we are looking for to elicit strong responses in our brain and not others that are not related to our search, and are distracting,"

"What we're trying to really understand is what other mechanisms or strategies the brain has to make searches efficient and easy,