It makes it hard to follow directions and instructions because they require holding multiple steps in mind. It can lead to losing important items and missing deadlines

We have a hard time prioritizing, and having a “good” memory involves paying attention to what is important. One study required children to remember specific words from a list. These were the “important” or priority words. Those with ADHD remembered the same number of words as those without the condition, but they were less likely to recall the important words.1

working memory is the ability to manipulate that information

People with ADHD sometimes interrupt others because they are afraid of forgetting what they want to say

Attention and memory are connected.

ADHD makes it hard to control one’s attention. Experts note that having problems with “source discrimination3" and “selective attention” lead to being “overwhelmed by unimportant stimuli.4"

In other words, we experience an information overload and do not know what to remember. It goes back to the test with the ADHD children who recalled the same number of words as their peers but not the “right” words.

On average, it was low, but when looked at individually, it showed that each ADHD child alternately processed problems quickly and slowly, though often as accurately as the other children.5

One is Area 25 (the subcallosal cingulate region), which mediates our unconscious and motor responses to emotional stress; the other is the right anterior insula, a region where self-awareness and interpersonal experience come together.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing.

Then there is the problem that one action can arise out of many different brain states and the same event can trigger many different brain reactions.

But the amygdala lights up during fear, happiness, novelty, anger or sexual arousal (at least in women). The insula plays a role in processing trust, insight, empathy, aversion and disbelief. So what are you really looking at?

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

A glass of water may be more meaningful to you when you are dying of thirst than when you are not. Your lover means more than your friend. It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.

Right now we are compelled to rely on different disciplines to try to understand behavior on multiple levels, with inherent tensions between them. Some people want to reduce that ambiguity by making one discipline all-explaining. They want to eliminate the confusing ambiguity of human freedom by reducing everything to material determinism.

An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data.

The brain is not the mind.

Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance.

The budget for your body tracks resources

Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.

Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.

This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical

There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body

When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”

I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.

when we extend our knowledge by deducing logical consequences of what we already know. If you know that either Mary or Mark did the murder (only they had access to the crime scene at the right time), and then Mary produces a rock-solid alibi, so you know she didn’t do it, you can deduce that Mark did it

Logic also helps us recognize our mistakes, when our beliefs turn out to contain inconsistencies. If I believe that no politicians are honest, and that John is a politician, and that he is honest, at least one of those three beliefs must be false, although logic doesn’t tell me which one.

The power of logic becomes increasingly clear when we chain together such elementary steps into longer and longer chains of reasoning, and the idea of logic as uninformative becomes correspondingly less and less plausible. Mathematics provides the most striking examples, since all its theorems are ultimately derived from a few simple axioms by chains of logical reasoning

The conception of logic as a neutral umpire of debate also fails to withstand scrutiny, for similar reasons. Principles of logic can themselves be debated,

one principle of standard logic is the law of excluded middle, which says that something either is the case, or it isn’t. Either it’s raining, or it’s not.

Whichever side is right, logical theories are players in these debates, not neutral umpires.

And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform.But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I’ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner.

So, is the Republican leadership unable to see through childish logical fallacies? No. The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit

All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we’re having some kind of rational discussion. We aren’t.

And yet, immersion in water up to the level of the heart has been shown to increase blood flow to one of the brain’s major arteries by 14 percent over that which you’d expect on land. So perhaps there is something special about swimming that is distinct from exercise on land.

Peaceful protests become violent. Health rapidly shifts to sickness. In places where there was once community, there is now division.

We aren’t just fighting over our opinions of facts; we are polarized over whether the fact is, in fact, a fact. We are at odds over whether science is real. We are at odds over whether an election has been won or lost. We are at odds over the value of compromise.

That polarization, coupled with the social isolation required to fight this pandemic, has left us feeling more alone than ever.

There is no one stopping to ask, “Are you OK?”

As much as we may disagree, as physically distanced as we may be, the truth is that we are more connected than ever because of all we have individually and collectively endured this year.

We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes — sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears. For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another.Are we OK?We will be.

focusing so narrowly, for so long, on tedious work that may not come to anything is inherently unappealing for most people. Rich and learned cultures across the world pursued all kinds of erudition and scholarly traditions, but didn’t develop this “knowledge machine” until relatively recently

it took a cataclysm to disrupt the longstanding way of looking at the world in terms of an integrated whole.

Even though Newton was an ardent alchemist with a side interest in biblical prophecy, he supported his scientific findings with empirical inquiry; he was, Strevens argues, “a natural intellectual compartmentalizer” who arrived at a fortuitous time.

“the iron rule of explanation,” requiring scientists to settle arguments by empirical testing, imposing on them a common language “regardless of their intellectual predilections, cultural biases or narrow ambitions.

Climate change, pandemics — he comes up to the present day, ending on a grim but resolute note, hopeful that scientists will adapt and find a better way to communicate with a suspicious public. “We’ve pampered and praised the knowledge machine, given it the autonomy it has needed to grow,” he writes. “Now we desperately need its advice.”

an early Internet video site that was bought by Yahoo, said that YouTube would eventually be “sued into oblivion” because of copyright violations.

dealing with YouTube “is not the typical situation we run into every day” because the company has not thought through many of the issues raised by its business.

“Part of what we are doing is working with them to figure out what their business model can be,”

The minute a Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp. buys YouTube, you have a target for anyone who wants to sue.

Yet behavioral targeting is, in some ways, “push” marketing carried to its extreme, with the advertiser controlling not just the content of its message but also the audience for it. Even if privacy concerns are overcome, can targeting work once consumers realize they are being “pushed”?

For example, surgeons are more likely to recommend surgery than non-surgeons. Radiation-oncologists recommend radiation more than other physicians. This is known as specialty bias.

patients with localized prostate cancer (a condition that has multiple effective treatment options) who heard their surgeon disclose his or her specialty bias were nearly three times more likely to have surgery than those patients who did not hear their surgeon reveal such a bias.

To be sure, physicians who disclose a financial conflict of interest or a specialty bias do not necessarily give poor advice.

When bias is unavoidable, as with specialty bias, options such as patient educational materials could alert patients to this problem without hearing it directly from the physician. Another solution could be multidisciplinary treatment consultations, in which patients meet multiple specialists at the same time.

Consumers should be aware of their reactions to disclosure and take time out to reconsider their options and seek second opinions. And advisers and policy makers must understand the potential unintended consequences when using disclosure as a solution to manage bias.

Dichotomy. Suppose a car is moving from to A to B . Let’s measure the distance between A and B by a scale according to which A is at point 0 and B is at point 1. Then before the car gets to point 1, it has to get half way there, point 1/2; and once it has got there, it has to get to a point half way between 1/2 and 1, 3/4; and so on… In other words, it has to get to every one of the infinite number of points 1/2, 3/4, 7/8

But you can’t do an infinite number of things in a finite time. So the car never get to point B.

At any rate, even after two and a half thousand years of trying to come up with an explanation of what is wrong with the argument in the Liar Paradox, there is still no consensus on the matter.

Interestingly, virtually everything else that Aristotle ever defended has been overthrown — or at least seriously challenged. The principle of noncontradiction is, it would seem, the last bastion!

A common suggestion of what it is for B to follow logically from A is that you can’t have A without having B. Given the principle of noncontradiction, if A is a contradiction, you can’t have it. And if you can’t have A, you certainly can’t have A and B. That is, everything follows from a contradiction.

People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast.

the continuity hypothesis. This framework holds that the content of dreams simply reflects what people thought, felt and did during the day — the good and the bad, the hopeful and the frightening.

dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas.

“I wasn’t expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears,”

Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance. I suspect this is the single most likely reason that sadness is up for women in these times.”

68 percent of American adults said that the 2020 election was a “significant source of stress” in their lives. (Among Democrats, the figure was 76 percent; it was 67 percent for Republicans and 64 percent for Independents.) Across the board, 77 percent of Americans said they were stressed about the future of the country.

It’s very bumpy and you’re riding along the highway and you have pothole after pothole. The news cycle is probably under 30 minutes right now.”

“What we’re seeing among Democrats is the sense that ‘we were in this position four years ago, so we’re not getting our hopes up,’” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Republicans are consistently more confident that the election is going to go the way they want.”

“Polls give people a false sense of security, and they think they don’t have to turn out to vote,” he said. “Is there going to be a peaceful transfer of power? That’s a big question. The big worry is that he won’t accept the results, or he’s going to incite violence.”

How could they? As might be expected from a law that tries to create a single accountability formula for every American school, No Child Left Behind is replete with technicalities and split hairs.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not want to take on the Bush administration over the federal law. The chancellor denied this, saying ''nothing is served'' by turning a tough equity issue into politics.

Recently, Mr. Klein had his photo taken with Bill Gates, who presented the city with $51 million to create small high schools. But principals of small high schools, like Louis Delgado of Vanguard in Manhattan, say transfers have devastated them this year.

It’s not funny. This is a man’s lifeline. He was born in 1908. He is my hero.

But once it was reinstalled at the apartment, my grandfather had issues reacquainting himself. The screen used to be blue, and now it was green.

Maybe it was time to stop trying. My grandfather would survive. Or wouldn’t. I thought the unthinkable: how much longer can he possibly live?

That very night, my grandfather fell out of bed and couldn’t get up. The staff member who found him in the morning asked why he hadn’t pulled the emergency cord. He said he didn’t remember there was such a thing. Anyway, he was sure it wouldn’t work — nothing in the bloody place was functioning as it should anymore.

Even at 102, things can snap back pretty quickly. Soon I will, via the classifieds, find a woman selling a 1999 orange iMac in “very decent condition.” On my way to get it, I will pass by a department store. There, I will buy a soap dish. And I will hope that this small, easy, sturdy transaction is a good omen for my grandfather’s next computer.

“It’s a demonstration of this very cool idea that you have remnants of previous thoughts still rattling around in your head, and you bind the representation of what’s happening now to the fading embers of those old thoughts,

They watched a series of nouns appear on a computer screen, one after another, and after a brief distraction recalled as many of the words as they could, in any order. Repeated trials, with different lists of words, showed a predictable effect: The participants tended to remember the words in clusters, beginning with one and recalling those that were just before or after.

This pattern, which scientists call the contiguity effect, is similar to what often happens in the card game concentration, in which players try to identify pairs in a grid of cards lying face-down.

remembering a fact (a broken table) recalls a scene (dancing), which in turn brings to mind more facts — like the other people who were there — and so on.

“When you activate one memory, you are reactivating a little bit of what was happening around the time the memory was formed,” Dr. Kahana said, “and this process is what gives you that feeling of time travel.”

Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.

because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.