{ Betina }

{ Jeroen Hofman }

{ Todd McLellan }

{ Technical aptitude: Do women score lower because they just aren’t interested? | Photo: Mark Kauffman, Children’s Village Ska, Stockholm, 1949 }

We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems. (…)

Drugs like Ritalin and amphetamines help people pay better attention. But they often only help people with lower baseline abilities; people who don’t have trouble paying attention in the first place can actually perform worse when they take attention-enhancing drugs. That suggests there is some kind of upper limit to how much people can or should pay attention. (…)

It may seem like a good thing to have a better memory, but people with excessively vivid memories have a difficult life. “Memory is a double-edged sword,” Hills says. In post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, a person can’t stop remembering some awful episode. “If something bad happens, you want to be able to forget it, to move on.”

Even increasing general intelligence can cause problems. Hills and Hertwig cite a study of Ashkenazi Jews, who have an average IQ much higher than the general European population. This is apparently because of evolutionary selection for intelligence in the last 2,000 years. But, at the same time, Ashkenazi Jews have been plagued by inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs disease that affect the nervous system. It may be that the increase in brain power has caused an increase in disease.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { Are You Smart Enough to Know You’re Stupid? }

Imagine a scientist gently swabs your left nostril with a Q-tip and finds that your nose contains hundreds of species of bacteria. That in itself is no surprise; each of us is home to some 100 trillion microbes. But then she makes an interesting discovery: in your nose is a previously unknown species that produces a powerful new antibiotic. Her university licenses it to a pharmaceutical company; it hits the market and earns hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you deserve a cut of the profits? (…)

In recent years, scientists have discovered remarkable complexity and power in the microbes that live inside us. We depend on this so-called microbiome for our well-being: it helps break down our food, synthesize vitamins and shield against disease-causing germs. (…)

Someday we may get important clues to people’s health from a survey of their microbes. Professor Rhodes argues that this sort of information will deserve the same protection as information about our own genes. (…)

But that is only one side of the issue. As scientists get to know the microbiome better, they are also looking for new medical treatments: after all, most antibiotics were first discovered in bacteria and fungi.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Roy DeCarava, Cab 173, New York, 1962 }

1. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas reasoned that the universe must have a First Cause, to which he assigned the name God.

2. Modern physicists in their way are likewise in search of a First Cause. (…)

A useful proxy for the First Cause is energy. (…) Yet no one thinks energy bears any resemblance to God in the traditional religious sense. It has neither knowledge nor will. It’s not a person. It doesn’t summon us to paradise or command us to embrace the good and shun evil. It provides our lives with no meaning. It’s just there.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

photo { Christiane Wöhler Friedebach }

1. Figure out what you’re so passionate about that you’d be happy doing it for 10 years, even if you never made any money from it. That’s what you should be doing.

(…)


10. Successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do.

{ ABC | via WSJ }

photo { Loretta Lux }

{ Toilet Paper magazine | Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari | Maurizio Cattelan Launches the Latest Issue of Toilet Paper At His Guggenheim Retrospective }

{ Horst P. Horst, Mrs. George Whitney, 1946 | Previously: Horst P. Horst, Costume for Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus, 1939 }

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Daniel Everett | 2. Lars Tunbjörk, Stockbroker Tokyo, 1999 }

{ Daniel Everett }

Whether you were happy with life as a teenager could be down to a certain gene, says a new study.

In a large study of American adolescents, teens who carried the long form of the 5HTTLPR locus were more likely to say they were satisfied or very satisified with their lives (at age 18 to 26). People with two long variants were the most cheerful, with short/long carriers in the middle and short/short being the least so. (…)

This study is the latest in a long, long line of attempts to correlate 5HTTLPR with happiness, depression, stress and so on. A few months ago I discussed the history of this busy little gene and covered a meta-analysis of no fewer than 54 papers which claimed that there was indeed a link, with the short allele increasing the risk of depression in response to stressful events.

However many studies failed to find one, and worryingly the three largest studies were all negative which is a classic tell-tale sign of publication bias.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Erica Segovia | 2. Maggie Lochtenberg }

{ 1. Steen Larsen | 2. Caitlin Teal Price }

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Dylan Collard }

I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. (…)

I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony.

{ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet | Continue reading }

photo { Alexey Titarenko }

{ Mitch Epstein, Santa Monica II, California, 1974 }

{ Mitch Epstein, Martha’s Vineyard Ferry I, Massachusetts, 1983 }

{ Carli Davidson }

{ Ramón Masats, Madrid, 1960 }

For men, significant predictors of infidelity are personality variables, including propensity for sexual excitation (becoming easily aroused by many triggers and situations) and concern about sexual performance failure.

For women, relationship happiness is paramount. Women who are dissatisfied with their relationship are more than twice as likely to cheat; those who feel they are sexually incompatible with their partners are nearly three times as likely.

{ University of Guelph | Continue reading }

photo { Judy Linn, Patti, left tit | Judy Linn, Photographs of Patti Smith, 1969-1976 | A muse named Patti Smith | NY Times }

related quote { ‘I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.’ –Kant }