During a brief stint of actually working at a tech company, I learned that some of the engineers and coders were viewed as just operating on a different plane: The code they wrote was better, tighter, and more elegant than other people’s, and they could write it much more quickly.

If you report long enough on politics and public life, even there you will see examples of exceptional strategic, analytic, and bargaining intelligence, along with a lot of clownishness.

They know what they don’t know. This to me is the most consistent marker of real intelligence. The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of what any individual person can never know. To read books seriously is to be staggered by the knowledge of how many more books will remain beyond your ken. It’s like looking up at the star-filled sky.

In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is: In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. This hardly seems conducive to living to fight another day.

such a risky habit is so common, and so persistent, suggests that whatever is happening is of the utmost importance. Whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.

“What is so important that you risk being eaten, not eating yourself, procreation ... for this?”

Lady Bird won the award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, but its writer and director Greta Gerwig was curiously not nominated for Best Director. That category’s five nominees were all male. In fact, only one woman has ever won a Golden Globe for directing: Barbra Streisand, in 1984, for Yentl. At the time, Gerwig was six months old, and her film’s lead actress had not yet been born. Hollywood remains an industry where women are more likely to be celebrated for speaking out in front of a camera than for holding one.

Finally, actresses are vulnerable, not only because men dominate powerful occupations, but also because women are cast to portray the very quality of vulnerability

Altogether, these surveys and studies suggest something quite simple: The ratio of women in an industry (like film) or in an occupation within that industry (like directing) shapes how women are treated. While more than 80 percent of women say they have been harassed at work, they are 50 percent more likely to say so in male-dominated industries.

PRINCETON, N.J.—Geo-engineering, its most enthusiastic advocates will tell you, isn’t only possible. It’s already happening.

We know, they say, because we’re doing it—we just call it global warming. As humanity dumps billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, we’ve engineered a different climate system: one that is hotter, wetter, and more unwieldy than what people have lived in since the dawn of agriculture.

Researchers speculate that planes could periodically spray a clear gas into the high atmosphere that would prevent some sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface, cooling the globe in turn.

People don’t need fancy technology to ignore each other, of course: It takes just as little effort to avoid responding to a letter, or a voicemail, or not to answer the door when the Girl Scouts come knocking. As Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University who studies language and technology, puts it, “We’ve dissed people in lots of formats before.” But what’s different now, she says, is that “media that are in principle asynchronous increasingly function as if they are synchronous.”

The result is the sense that everyone could get back to you immediately, if they wanted to—and the anxiety that follows when they don’t. But the paradox of this age of communication is that this anxiety is the price of convenience. People are happy to make the trade to gain the ability to respond whenever they feel like it.

It’s anxiety-inducing because written communication is now designed to mimic conversation—but only when it comes to timing. It allows for a fast back-and-forth dialogue, but without any of the additional context of body language, facial expression, and intonation. It’s harder, for example, to tell that someone found your word choice off-putting, and thus to correct it in real-time, or try to explain yourself better. When someone’s in front of you, “you do get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face,” Turkle says.

These findings suggest more evidence for why heuristics, or rules of thumb, are both so effective and ubiquitous. Consider a few from the financial world: Pay yourself first. Sell in May and go away. Buy and hold. Only use the principal. Buy low, sell high. The list could go on and on.

It’s no surprise that financial stress is draining. Anyone who’s worried over a budget or fretted about making the wrong investment choice or major purchase can recognize the telltale signs of such anxiety. But what’s actually happening to your brain when you feel under such pressure?

New research conducted by neuroscientist Sam Barnett, co-founder of ThinkAlike Laboratories and sponsored by Northwestern Mutual, offers a rare glimpse at the brain while it is making financial decisions—and finds that anxiety actually impairs our ability to make sound decisions.

When someone says they aren’t a morning person, it may be closer to the truth than you think.  "Every person has their own brain profile," Cerf said. We each have a circadian rhythm, or an internal master clock that influences when we wake and sleep.

With the help of technology, sensors measuring brain activity can reveal how someone feels when they make choices. “We look at your diary for the entire week. We look at all the choices you made, and you try to tell me which ones you’re happy with and which ones you aren’t.” Then, Cerf compares those responses to brain activity to expose the truth.

A major influence on your productivity is sleep. Insomnia leads to the loss of 11.3 days’ worth of productivity each year on average, according to a Harvard research study. Your brain and your body need rest. This is why Cerf stressed that we should unplug entirely when we go on vacation. He even suggested changing your standard auto-reply for work emails to an auto-delete.

The world is on the cusp of redefining brain aging. Asia Pacific, known for countries with rapidly aging populations, has unimaginable potential to lead the charge in research and innovation for better, younger, healthier brains.

The human brain contains approximately 80 billion neurons, has trillions of connections, is estimated to store up to 2.5 petabytes of memory, and for more than 3000 years we’ve asked questions about how it works.

One thing we have realized is that as exceptional as our brain is, the biological process of aging, also occurs in the brain.

We are learning a lot right now about the neuroscience of emotions. Specifically, we are learning that there is a lot of overlap between the way we process physical pain and the way we process emotional pain.

Understanding emotional pain could be powerful in understanding a lot of the common emotional maladies that are regularly treated with psychotherapy or mood altering medications. Depression, anxiety, trauma, social pain, these are all debilitating disorders that are poorly understood and often poorly treated.

Humans are a unique species in two ways that account for our intense response to social rejection. We are born physically immature because of our enormous heads, and we require a lot of care early on. Because of our immaturity at birth, our species has selected for a deeply innate sense of bonding between individuals. The other unique feature of our species is that we require a lot of calories, probably also due to our oversized brains. Brains are calorie intensive organs and our brains are huge. So, humans burn about 400 more calories per day than other primates when you account for size [2]. Since we burn so much food, we as a species, have an innate drive to share food, which may have allowed us to get through bad hunting or gathering days in early human history. So, humans are naturally drawn to bond with others and to be conscious of aligning with a group of people where food sharing is possible.

fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.

Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.

It’s why you jump when you sense rustling in the bushes before realizing it’s just your neighbor’s cat. That reflex can save your life in certain circumstances such as leaping out of the way of an oncoming car. Trouble starts when you can’t tamp down your amygdala’s response, which makes you obsess and perhaps do counterproductive things when faced with concerning but not life-threatening events like the Equifax hack or a vulnerable social situation like asking someone out on a date.

When Ms. Gregory consulted with a neurologist about how to delay the onset of illness, he had four words for her: “Good luck with that.” After all, no drug had proven effective in reversing Alzheimer’s disease. And preventive measures like diet and exercise, the neurologist told her, would do no good.

So you may be faced with some difficult choices within the next decade: Do you want to receive potentially alarming news about your cognitive health, or would you rather not? If you learn that you have a high risk for Alzheimer’s, is that information you will want to keep private — from employers, clients, health insurers and others? Or will you want to openly embrace it as part of your identity and publicly advocate for a cure?

Jason Karlawish, a professor of medicine and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people at high risk of Alzheimer’s disease cope with that knowledge. “We have to make it socially acceptable to talk about having risk of getting dementia,” he told me. “I think that is one of the ground zero struggles we are going to face in the coming decades.”

Exercise broadly improves our memories and thinking skills, according to a wealth of science. The evidence supporting similar benefits from so-called brain training has been much iffier, however, with most people performing better only on the specific types of games or tasks practiced in the program.

Most of us are blissfully unaware of the complexity of our brain’s memory systems. Memories come in many different types, including detailed recollections of faces and objects and how they differ from similar faces and objects, as well as separate memories about where and when we last saw those things. These remembrances are created and stored throughout the hippocampus, our brain’s primary memory center.

In general, the young people who had exercised, whether they also brain trained or not, were then more physically fit than those in the control group. They also, for the most part, performed better on memory tests. And those improvements spanned different types of memory, including the ability to rapidly differentiate among pictures of objects that looked similar, a skill not practiced in the brain-training group.

This process can be conscious, as in the soccer example, or unconscious, so that we are not even aware we are doing it. Using technology that tracks eye movements, cognitive scientists at MIT have now obtained the first direct evidence that people unconsciously use counterfactual simulation to imagine how a situation could have played out differently.

“What’s really cool about eye tracking is it lets you see things that you’re not consciously aware of,” Tenenbaum says. “When psychologists and philosophers have proposed the idea of counterfactual simulation, they haven’t necessarily meant that you do this consciously. It’s something going on behind the surface, and eye tracking is able to reveal that.”

“It’s in the close cases where you see the most counterfactual looks. They’re using those looks to resolve the uncertainty,” Tenenbaum says.

Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University.

This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by the person seeking it, suggesting that babies acquire very early an intuition about how people make decisions.

“This paper is not the first to suggest that idea, but its novelty is that it shows this is true in much younger babies than anyone has seen. These are preverbal babies, who themselves are not actively doing very much, yet they appear to understand other people’s actions in this sophisticated, quantitative way,”

“You fucking wicked kike whore,” Andrew Auernheimer, The Daily Stormer’s webmaster, said in a voicemail for Gersh. “This is Trump’s America now.”

Over the next week, the Stormers besieged Whitefish businesses, human-rights groups, city-council members—anyone potentially connected to the targets. A single harasser called Judah’s office more than 500 times in three days, according to the Whitefish police. Gersh came home one night to find her husband sitting at home in the dark, suitcases on the floor, wondering whether they should flee. “I have never been so scared in my entire life,” she later told me.

That Anglin, a 33-year-old college dropout, could unleash such mayhem—Whitefish’s police chief, Bill Dial, likened it to “domestic terrorism”—was a sign of just how emboldened the alt-right had become.

My first 18 months of military service were uninspiring. Donning the uniform did not fill me with pride, nor did the experience alter my perspective on life. What basic training had taught me was that the best way to get by was to stay out of sight.

Accordingly, my detachment expanded its mission: all males—soldiers and others of military serviceable age, no matter where encountered or whether in uniform—were to be taken prisoner unless they had persuasive evidence of either having been exempted or discharged from military service. Anyone without such proof was considered a potential guerilla. A sweep of the countryside would yield scores of German “civilians,” among them soldiers who had simply shed their uniform or party activists suspected of organizing a resistance usually with cover stories that I had to break. Not only did I become very adept at this task, but it also gave me some great insights into postwar German mentalities—insights that would later inspire me to revisit my views on higher education.

Wilke and his family had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s, and he still spoke German with a genuine Saxon dialect.

Es así como, casi sin darnos cuenta, comenzamos a comportarnos como productos, siempre buscando tener más compradores, en función de la identidad más "vendedora".

Aunque tiene el potencial para convertirse en el Gran Hermano, la diferencia con la versión de George Orwell es que en ella las cámaras y micrófonos eran instaladas en contra de la voluntad de sus habitantes, mientras que

"Trino, luego existo", podría ser el eslogan del hombre moderno, para quien su valor se mide a menudo en el número de amigos virtuales que logra acumular, en cuantos 'Me Gusta' obtiene por sus comentarios, imágenes y publicaciones en red.

The Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove that growing up poor can keep a child’s brain from developing.

handful of neuroscientists and pediatricians who’ve seen increasing evidence that poverty itself – and not factors like nutrition, language exposure, family stability, or prenatal issues, as previously thought – may diminish the growth of a child’s brain.

poor kids tended to perform worse academically than their better-off peers

World-leading neuroscientists have launched an ambitious project to answer one of the greatest mysteries of all time: how the brain decides what to do.

If the researchers can unravel what happens in detail, it would mark a dramatic leap forward in scientists’ understanding of a process that lies at the heart of life, and which ultimately has implications for intelligence and free will.

Half of the IBL researchers will perform experiments and the other half will focus on theoretical models of how the brain makes up its mind.

The vast majority of people — up to 95 percent, in fact — believe they have a decent amount of self-awareness. And maybe you’re one of the lucky 10 to 15 percent who really does have an accurate view of themselves — but if we’re going by the numbers, well, the odds aren’t in your favor.

On a good day, 80 percent of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves

Internal self-awareness is the ability to introspect and recognize your authentic self, whereas external self-awareness is the ability to recognize how you fit in with the rest of the world. “It’s almost like two different camera angles,” Eurich says.