In his seminal work of science fiction, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams ponders a question, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be difficult to answer: What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? In the novel, a super-intelligent civilization builds a super-computer to answer the question. That super-computer cannot answer the […]
I sometimes wish I had perfect memory. No more missed appointments! I’d never misplace my phone (it’s always on my bedroom dresser). And I’d always remember the name of that actress (whats-her-name, in that thing!), or my colleague (sorry….), or my friend (really??). Yep, life would be pretty sweet. Despite these fantasies, individuals with highly-superior […]
Imagine a world in which Einstein crafted his general theory of relativity – discovering and codifying the laws that govern light, space, and time – then went about his life, never publishing, and never telling another person. It may seem obvious, but scientific knowledge, in order to influence the generation of future scientific knowledge or […]
Musical training encompasses a broad range of skills, which likely rely on a similarly large range of cognitive abilities. Consider the act of sight-reading, in which a musician plays from a piece of sheet music they have never seen before. The musician must read the upcoming notes (a feat of translating visual information into a […]
How many U.S. presidents can you name? (Apologies to our international audience.) Regardless of how many you can recall, I would bet that among the ones you did remember are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Trump, Obama, and Bush. I would also bet that among the ones you did not remember are McKinley, Hoover, and Cleveland. Don’t […]
Remember answering machines? Me neither, but this is why Seinfeld exists. When Jerry’s girlfriend, Sophie, leaves a message without stating her name (just, “it’s me!”), Jerry decides to call her back without stating his own name. Stripped of visual and contextual cues—Jerry’s face, what he’s wearing, his name—Sophie fails to identify him by just his […]
On Monday, May 14th, 2018 the US Supreme Court effectively legalized sports gambling. Of course, prior to that ruling, sports gambling had been possible in the US, in various forms, online (one-day fantasy sports contests, like DraftKings) and through offshore betting venues. While fans had ample opportunity to wager on the performances of individual players […]
There are no new ideas in Hollywood. The top 12 grossing films in the US last year were all, in one way or another, derivative content (6 super hero films, 3 remakes, 2 sequels, and a Star Wars). The increasingly serialized nature of the film industry may derive from the rise in recent years of […]
Human beings have an incredible capability to communicate. Unlike other species, humans have evolved to use language to express our states, desires, observations, and, I guess, tweet about them. Language is a powerful system of communication because it allows the expression of counterfactuals: we can easily discuss the past and future; distant, unseen locations; complex […]
Memory researchers love chess. Chess experts have been studied by psychologists to try to explain the role of higher-level processing in memory. One reason chess is a great domain in which to ask these questions is because its rules and concepts provide meaning to the spatial positions of the pieces only if one knows them. […]