Notre cerveau est génial (et nous ne le savons pas) On sait que c’est l’entité la plus complexe de l’univers connu. Mais les découvertes se multiplient et font exploser tous les schémas. Notre cerveau est bien plus élastique que prévu, ses neurones peuvent même repousser. Et il fonctionne en wifi, relié aux cerveaux des autres. Combiner ces deux approches révolutionnaires, c’est admettre que l’Homo sapiens peut modifier lui-même sa structure – et donc que le monde n’est pas forcément fichu ! 1, un cerveau plastique qui peut voir avec la peau L’idée de plasticité corticale et neuronale ne figure dans aucun programme de médecine avant les années 1990 : les premiers qui en parlent sont ridiculisés, tels Paul Bach-y-Rita et son frère George, deux médecins hors norme qui, à la fin des années 1960, réussissent à sauver leur père, un professeur de tango paralysé par un accident vasculaire cérébral (AVC) et que les neurologues disaient condamné. 2, des trillons de milliards de réseaux neuronaux De nouveaux neurones ?
Pets Share Owners' Diseases When Janet Riordan returned home from a European vacation in January, she expected a storm of tail wagging and barking from her 7-year-old golden retriever, Reggie. The moment she saw him, she knew something was wrong. “He came to me in my arms and appeared to be sobbing. A veterinarian confirmed her fears: Reggie had an aggressive form of lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells. Riordan knew the toll that lymphoma could take. “It was devastating,” Riordan said. Pet owners share their homes, their exercise habits and sometimes even their food with their four-legged companions. Now researchers are examining the role that pollutants and other environmental factors play in these dual diseases. “Because our pets share our environments, they are exposed to many of the same pollutants as us,” said Melissa Paoloni, a veterinary oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland. Scientific research is beginning to reveal some links between their environment and their health.
Companion Animal Psychology: Are young children more interested in animals than toys? At what age do children develop a fascination with animals? A brand new paper by Vanessa LoBue et al investigates young children’s interest in live animals. A set of three studies looked at young children in a naturalistic play environment in which they could choose to interact with animals or toys. The animals were always in an enclosure, so the children could only look at them and not physically touch them. One obvious difference between animals and toys is that the animals move. The first study was an exploratory one involving children aged between 11 and 40 months. The results showed that children interacted more frequently with the animals than the toys, and spent more time interacting with the animals than the two most popular toys. The second study was similar, but this time as well as the fish and hamster there was a black Tarantula and an orange and black California Mountain King snake. The final study utilized a more controlled design. Infants aged 18 – 33 months took part.
Being a Great Leader Means You Go First A leader will help your organization steer through tough times; a good leader will have a plan in place already to react quickly to change; a great leader will have course corrected long ago so that you will never know what dangers were in your path. Part of being a great leader is setting your organization on a new course well before anyone else can see it. For this reason, great leaders are often denounced and attacked for taking that first step. Many aspire to be great leaders as we see the spoils after the fact – the corner office, a book deal, corporate perks, power, money, etc. What few understand is that being a great leader means having to stand completely alone with your beliefs. Off all leaders, there are few great leaders. See Around Corners Great leaders see the path before anyone else. How do you replicate that? Know your history. Do the Right Thing Great leaders make the right choice, even when it is not the popular choice. Unwavering
The Salvation Army and Goodwill: Inside the places your clothes go when you donate them Spencer Platt/Getty. It was early morning at the Quincy Street Salvation Army, an easy-to-miss location tucked away on a Brooklyn side street. The only donations that had come in so far were books, an entire truck full from one single apartment. Michael Noneza, otherwise known as “Maui,” one of the donation center’s assistant supervisors, bounced into the warehouse. The Quincy Street Salvation Army may be on a quiet out-of-the-way street, but it is the main distribution center serving eight Salvation Army locations in Brooklyn and Queens. What American doesn’t have something hanging in his or her closet worn only once or twice, a pair of pants waiting for a diet, or even a brand-new dress or jacket with the tags still on? There is an enormous disconnect between increasing clothing consumption and the resultant waste, partially because unworn clothes aren’t immediately thrown out like other disposable products. Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images.
23. Civilisations du cerveau gauche Lucien Israël dans son livre "Cerveau droit, cerveau gauche : cultures et civilisations" fait la distinction entre civilisations basées sur des critères de cerveau droit et, essentiellement aujourd’hui, la civilisation occidentale, fondée sur le mariage, très hémisphère gauche, du génie Grec et de la culture judéo-chrétienne. D’autres civilisations se sont, au cours de l’Histoire, développées selon les puissants préceptes du cerveau gauche, des sumériens, aux égyptiens, en passant par les mayas, de la Chine de Confucius à l’Inde des yogis. Dans les sociétés traditionnelles, l’emprise des dieux, des ancêtres, de la magie est encore déterminante alors que la logique, la raison ou la critique ne sont que secondaires. Ce sont des sociétés qui vivent au rythme de l’hémisphère droit, où l’hémisphère gauche n’est pas encore dominant. Savoir associer les deux L’exemple du Japon A cet égard la culture japonaise offre des particularités très intéressantes.
Gender bias: ethical implications of an empirical finding. | Doing Good Science By now, you may have seen the recently published study by Ross-Macusin et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”, or the nice discussion by Ilana Yurkiewicz of why these findings matter. Briefly, the study involved having science faculty from research-focused universities rate materials from potential student candidates for a lab manager position. The researchers attached names to the application materials — some of them male names, some of them female names — at random, and examined how the ratings of the materials correlated with the names that were attached to them. What they found was that the same application materials got a higher ranking (i.e., a judgment that the applicant would be more qualified for the job) when the attached name was male than when it was female. Moreover, both male and female faculty ranked the same application more highly when attached to a male name.
Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already. Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. This paper has become a cult classic.
Create The Next Angry Birds Or Instagram Using Only A Web Browser Do you have a terrific app concept in your head, but don’t know how to explain it, let alone create it? Fluid UI might have the tool for you. Mobile Mockups lets you design apps using only a Web browser. Featuring drag and drop technology, Mobile Mockups offers an easy and effective way to design iPhone, iPad, and Android apps in minutes. To get started, you’ll be asked to setup an account on the Fluid UI website. Now the fun begins. Using the site’s live editor, you can select objects to include on your design. Adding new objects is as easy as dragging them into your virtual device and then positioning them accordingly. Don’t like how your mockup looks? It really works! According to Fluid UI’s Ian Hannigan, their goal was to create an easy and inexpensive tool for users to validate their app ideas and designs during the early stages without barriers. Indeed they got this right. I especially like the tool’s export capabilities, which makes sharing your designs a breeze.
BBC Future column: Why we love to hoard Here’s last week’s column from BBC Future. The original is here. It’s not really about hoarding, its about the endowment effect and a really lovely piece of work that helped found the field of behavioural economics (and win Daniel Kahneman a Nobel prize). Oh, and I give some advice on how to de-clutter, lifehacker-style. Question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive? Answer: By giving it away. This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. You can see how the endowment effect escalates – how else can you explain the boxes of cassette tapes, shoes or mobile phones that fill several shelves of your room… or even several rooms? No trade Classic economics states that the students should begin to trade with each other.