“Brain’s God Spot Discovered By Scientists.” That’s the headline the Huffington Post ran with after a team of neuroscientists discovered that profound religious and spiritual experiences light up discrete portions of the brain. That the media termed these chunks of mystical gray matter the “God Spot” was both clever and predictable; thus reduced, the research became instantly famous and immediately controversial: People didn’t want to see their deepest beliefs reduced to a simple biological explanation. Neuroscientists are now able to use sophisticated technology to peer ... Read More
I Foresee an Uproar Over an ESP Study
January 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One evening more than a decade ago, I attended a talk by Daryl Bem, a well-known psychologist, at Reed College in Portland, Ore. Bem claimed that humans might be capable of precognition, or the ability to predict the future. As a newly minted Reed psychology graduate, Bem inspired me to write a computer program to test my own precognitive abilities. I happened to tell my boss and mentor at Reed, Allen Neuringer, about my little self-experiment. Allen, a wonderful person and adviser, and a behaviorist interested in hard facts, looked at me, paused for a moment, said "ESP doesn't exist," and ... Read More
Information Superhighway Just Vapid Transit?
September 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Consider an industrial printing press. It is expensive and technologically archaic. It groans and grinds. It clanks and spits grease. Roald Dahl could have built a short story around one: “The Finger Snatcher.” Now take the Internet. It is free and efficient. Anyone with a rudimentary sense of technology can use it to view or create content, so long as they have access to a computer and a little free time. At some point in the last decade, the latter of these two technologies eclipsed the former as the world’s most important vehicle of mass communication. By doing so it sparked a ... Read More
A Really Hard Test Really Helps Learning
January 19, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
The first time Sarah Patterson got pimped by her attending doctor, it was a distinctly unpleasant experience. A medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, Patterson had just begun a rotation on the wards of the city's General Hospital. While doing rounds, the doctor asked her, in front of their entire medical team, to list all of the causes of atrial fibrillation — a kind of medical school pop quiz that Patterson and her fellow students refer to as "getting pimped." "I didn't know all of them, and I fumbled and tried to string together what I knew into a coherent ... Read More