I read lots of books and articles, but I seem to forget most of what I have learned in them. How can I remember what I learned? A Recommended Reading List For Trump’s America Copies of George Orwell’s 1984 sold out during the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency. Demand for the book has been so overwhelming that the publisher has issued a 75 000-copy reprint. If your copy hasn’t arrived yet, here are nineteen authors on the books you should be reading in the age of Trump. 1. Recommended reading: Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think by Ralph Nader “Remember The Matrix? 2. Recommended reading: I, Claudius by Robert Graves “The second half of the novel has Claudius watching as his uncle, the madman Caligula, assumes power and trashes the shit out of the Roman empire. 3. Recommended reading: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler “It’s 2024. 4. Recommended reading: Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai “It’s about a young gay boy coming of age in Sri Lanka’s capital as ethnic tensions build before the start of the civil war in 1983. 5. Recommended reading: The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser and Resist Much, Obey Little 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
How to Get Your Mind to Read In one experiment, third graders — some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor — were asked to read a passage about soccer. The poor readers who knew a lot about soccer were three times as likely to make accurate inferences about the passage as the good readers who didn’t know much about the game. That implies that students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test. Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design. Don’t blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans’ poor reading.
Masahide’s Barn and the Meaning of Life – Martin Pigg After watching his barn burn to the ground, 17th Century samurai and poet Mizuta Masahide wrote the following haiku: “Barn’s burnt down now I can see the moon” Masahide’s quote came to me, as most God-winks do, at a time when I was struggling to see the half-full glass in front of me. I’d recently jettisoned the vestiges of, what most folks consider, a normal life; the job and the house were gone. And as I moved my life in a new direction, it was often easier to see the obstacles than the opportunities. The quote resonated so strongly because it reminded me that what’s needed most in challenging times is the courage to look for beauty and meaning amidst the rubble. It’s easy to give up, to tell ourselves that what’s happened means the end of our dreams. Maybe you’ve watched as your metaphorical barn burned to the ground. My message to you is this: Look Up. See the moon
The Grey Muzzle Organization Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer's Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience This is not as weird as it sounds. He is incredibly joyful, perhaps equally as much as his teacher Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. We were at TED Global and because I knew of Ricard’s work, I had been trying to meet him, but he was constantly mobbed. When I spotted him walking alone, I said, “Matthieu, I have been looking for you!” He replied, “Paul, I have been looking for you.” We hugged and talked science, and then the speaker concierge from TED tried to pull him away to do his “hair and makeup” preparation before his talk. Having met Ricard and knowing Wolf Singer's research, I was delighted to learn of their book three years later. Their book is an edited set of conversations Ricard and Singer had over the course of eight years at meetings around the world. Ricard offers the effects of meditation on mental processes as a window into how the brain works, while Singer states the scientific consensus on the neural mechanisms producing these effects.
Earth - How our ancestors drilled rotten teeth Imagine a world without toothbrushes, mouthwash and dental floss. That’s an easy one, right? There would be rotten teeth in every mouth, and rich dentists in every town. The earliest prehistoric human ever found in Africa seemed to confirm as much. Look into the mouths of most other early human fossils and you’ll rarely find a dental cavity It had a sloping forehead, giant brow ridges and cavities in 10 of its teeth. But here’s the surprise: the Broken Hill skull is a strange (and still largely unexplained) anomaly. In fact, rotten teeth only became a common problem very recently - about 10,000 years ago - at the dawn of the Neolithic period, a time when our ancestors began farming. Or, to put it another way, it looks like the dental drill predates writing, civilisation, and even the invention of the wheel by thousands of years. Tooth decay is not entirely absent from pre-agricultural societies, but it’s very rare. Carbohydrates, in general, are bad for teeth And you can imagine why.
Multitasking: Switching costs Gopher, D., Armony, L. & Greenspan, Y. (2000). Switching tasks and attention policies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 308-229. Mayr, U. & Kliegl, R. (2000). Meuter, R. Meyer, D. Meyer, D. Monsell, S., Azuma, R., Eimer, M., Le Pelley, M., & Strafford, S. (1998, July). Monsell, S., Yeung, N., & Azuma, R. (2000). Monsell, S. & Driver, J., Eds. (2000). Rogers, R. & Monsell, S. (1995). Rubinstein, J., Evans, J. & Meyer, D. Rubinstein, J. Yeung, N. & Monsell, S. (2003).
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble. People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments. But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Is there a gift? Still puzzled
Air ions and mood outcomes: a review and meta-analysis Capital - Is there an upside to having no social life? Editor’s Note (December 21, 2017): Through to the end of the year, BBC Capital is bringing back some of your favourite stories from 2017. The trick to being successful could, in fact, be simple. For one month, I declined all in-person activities with friends to see if it would make me more productive From my own experience interviewing highly successful artists, writers, and creative entrepreneurs I’ve found one of the most common responses to the question of how they can be so prolific to be, ‘well, I don’t have a social life.’ Time sink As a freelancer working solo from home, while my housemates head out to work, I justified a very active social life as basic human necessity. I calculated that, on average, I was spending 22 hours or more each week on social activities. I knew, at times, I filled my schedule simply out of fear of missing out (FOMO), an inability to say no, but also as a sneaky way to procrastinate or shift focus away from my work. Thirty-one days later Embrace boredom