museums

The Age of Mass Intelligence?

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“We’ve all heard about dumb­ing down. But there is plen­ty of evi­dence that the oppo­site is also true. Is this, in fact, the age of mass intelligence?”

Fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle in Intel­li­gent Life, a pub­li­ca­tion by The Economist:

THE AGE OF MASS INTELLIGENCE

- “Mil­lions more peo­ple are going to muse­ums, lit­er­ary fes­ti­vals and operas; mil­lions more watch demand­ing tele­vi­sion pro­grammes or down­load seri­ous-mind­ed pod­casts. Not all these activ­i­ties count as mind-stretch­ing, of course. Some are down­right fluffy. But, says Don­na Ren­ney, the chief exec­u­tive of the Chel­tenham Fes­ti­vals, audi­ences increas­ing­ly want “the buzz you get from work­ing that lit­tle bit hard­er”. This is a dra­mat­ic yet often unrecog­nised devel­op­ment. “When peo­ple talk and write about cul­ture,” says Ira Glass, the cre­ator of the riv­et­ing pub­lic-radio show “This Amer­i­can Life”, “it’s apoc­a­lyp­tic. We tell our­selves that every­thing is in bad shape. But the oppo­site is true. There’s an abun­dance of real­ly inter­est­ing things going on all around us.”

- “Third, what does all this say about the wide­spread view that soci­eties are dumb­ing down, edu­ca­tion­al stan­dards are crum­bling and people’s abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate is col­laps­ing? The reply must be that it can­not be true across the board and that for a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber, the oppo­site is the case: peo­ple want more intel­lec­tu­al­ly demand­ing things to see and hear, not few­er. Sure­ly both things are hap­pen­ing at once: part of the pop­u­la­tion is dumb­ing down, part is wis­ing up.”

Full arti­cle: THE AGE OF MASS INTELLIGENCE

For a relat­ed blog arti­cle: Exer­cise your brain in the Cog­ni­tive Age

Looking inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

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MRI scanner neuroimaging

Today we have the plea­sure to have Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, write her first arti­cle here. Enjoy, and please com­ment so we hear your thoughts and engage in a nice conversation.

(Btw, if you notice some sim­i­lar­i­ty between the col­ors in the fMRI scan below and the look & feel of this site…well, the rea­son is that those orange-grey fMRI col­ors were our inspi­ra­tion! the orange col­or denotes the most brain activation).

- Alvaro

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You have prob­a­bly heard about CAT and MRI scans (pro­duced thanks to machines like the one to the top right). So you know that these are tech­niques that doc­tors and sci­en­tists use to look inside the brain.

You have prob­a­bly also heard about brain fit­ness and how impor­tant it is to keep a healthy brain to be pro­tect­ed against age-relat­ed and dis­ease-relat­ed brain damages.

The ques­tion we ask here is the fol­low­ing: Can we use brain scans to eval­u­ate how fit the brain is? Before we try to answer this ques­tion let’s start with the basics and try to under­stand how brain scans work.

Brain imag­ing, also called neu­roimag­ing, allows one to [Read more…] about Look­ing inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

Discover the Brain

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Hot off the press!

We just found on the new­stand an amaz­ing spe­cial issue of Dis­cov­er mag­a­zine on The Brain-An Own­er’s Man­u­al (Spring 2007), with fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles on how the mind changes from infan­cy to old age, female vs. male brains (yes, we men have brains too), videogames as brain train­ing (by Steven John­son), an arti­cle titled “24 hours in the life of the brain”, the “most mag­nif­i­cent neu­rons, and much much more.

A bit tech­ni­cal, but not too much for any­one who reads pop­u­lar sci­ence books. It will prob­a­bly become a clas­sic for brain afi­ciona­dos. We can not find any men­tion of it in www.discover.com, so we will keep our eyes open and link to the index and more info as soon as we find some­where to link to…ÂÂ