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Intuition allows us make judgments in the blink of an eye without careful deliberation or systematic analysis of all the available facts. We trust our “gut” reactions and first impressions. They enable us to discern the sincerity of a conversation partner, read the prevailing ambience in a room or feel a sense of impending doom. These insights or early warning "survival" mechanisms are palpable and we ignore them at our peril. They are only irrational in the sense that the cognitive fragments (some of them non-linguistic) and experiential memories that support them remain largely hidden.

What’s startling is how many mystery infections still exist today.

More than a third of acute respiratory illnesses are idiopathic; the same is true for up to 40 percent of gastrointestinal disorders and more than half the cases of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).

Up to 20 percent of cancers and a substantial portion of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, are thought to have viral triggers, but a vast majority of those have yet to be identified.

But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.

This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

Science comes hard to most of us because it can’t really take that form. Instead it’s equations, models, theories and the data that support them. But ironically, science offers an explanation of why we love stories.

It starts with a challenge posed in human evolution — but the more we come to understand about that subject, the more we see that our storytelling instinct can lead us astray, especially when it comes to how most of us understand history.

Many animals have highly developed mind-reading instinct, a sort of tracking-device technique shared with creatures that have no language, not even a language of thought.

In this book, Rosenberg elaborates further such arguments to take issue with historical narratives and, more generally, with the way in which we most pervasively make sense of people's actions and motivations through narratives.

His main contention is that such narratives are always wrong or, to put it differently, that they can't possibly be right.

Rosenberg argues that neuroscience itself, our only reliable method to study psychological capacities, shows that theory of mind's posits do not exist

"I'd say, 'Wait! Don't tell me!' And try to guess their voices," Jeffords explains. "Some of them had such unique voices [over Zoom] that I could tell, but others never really spoke, so it felt like having new students in front of me."

"I'm a really social person," she explains. "Once you get used to waking up and then logging into class, it gets really tiring just sitting all day in your pajamas not doing anything. But waking up, having something to get ready for, seeing old friends – oh my gosh!' "

But there was one surprising difference when she actually met them in person.

The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.

According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media.

To boost self-esteem and feel a sense of belonging in their social circles, people post content with the hope of receiving positive feedback. Couple that content with the structure of potential future reward, and you get a recipe for constantly checking platforms.

In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.

For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.

In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.

In an era when everyone seems eager to point out instances of “fake news,” it is easy to forget that knowing how we make sense of the news is as important as knowing how to spot incorrect or biased content

While the ability to analyze the credibility of a source and the veracity of its content remains an essential and often-discussed aspect of news literacy, it is equally important to understand how we as news consumers engage with and react to the information we find online, in our feeds, and on our apps

People process information they receive from the news in the same way they process all information around them — in the shortest, quickest way possible

During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church

A type of war between science and religion was in play but there would be more casualties on the side of science.

Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were two scientists who printed books that later became banned

The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded

When the new grammatical structures and phrases express something that conventional language simply cannot

this new grammar-bending, punctuation-erasing, verb-into-noun-turning, key-board-smashing linguistic convention doesn’t dominate the whole Interne

language generated on Tumblr is is now becoming Facebook and Twitter language and influencing language everywhere from Buzzfeed to Autostraddle.

But the brain doesn’t contain any digital switches and was not designed for the convenience or edification of any external user. The idea that it is a computer is just the latest in a series of metaphors, and one that is looking increasingly threadbare.

how previous ages thought of the brain. It was a collection of cavities through which animal spirits flowed; then it became a machine, which was a breakthrough idea: perhaps you could investigate it as you might any machine, by breaking it down into its constituent parts and seeing what they do.

A century later, electricity was the fashionable thing, so natural philosophers began to theorise that perhaps the animal spirits sloshing around in the brain were in fact a kind of “electric fluid”.

Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988

It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.

His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”

the ghosts seem to be turning out in large numbers to cast their ballots early.

The long lines are an important reminder that the 2020 election will be won or lost based on the ground game.

Voting restrictions (photo identification requirements, registration limits and more) that have been imposed in more than 25 states heighten the importance of obtaining as large a margin as possible.

how the brain encodes time and place into memories.

how the brain encodes time and place into memories.

new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer's disease.