Uncertainty Is Your Friend, Part III: Emotions Are All of the Above All available evidence suggests that the brain has enormous flexibility to do a lot of different things at one time. Mental focus is hard because it forces the brain to concentrate its resources, something it is naturally inclined to do only with the prospect of reward or in the face of threat.We lose sight of brain flexibility in emotions in part because when we express an emotion, it seems like
I'm a Late Bloomer Too: My Unlikely Path to Publication If you will indulge me in a bit of narcissism--something they say I'm good at--I'd like to talk about my unlikely path to publication at the non-juvenile age of 62. In my previous post--"Prodigies vs. Late Bloomers: Wolfgang Mozart or Elliott Carter"--I talked about the age disparities of scientific and artistic achievement. Mozart who died at 35 is one of the all-time great creative achievers. E
Prodigies vs. Late Bloomers: Wolfgang Mozart or Elliott Carter? Age is but a fever chillthat every physicist must fear.He's better dead than living stillwhen once he's past his thirtieth year.This bit of doggerel was penned by Paul Dirac, a much greater physicist than poet. He was a founder of quantum mechanics, winning the Nobel Prize for work he did at age 25. Einstein agreed with him when he said, "A person who has not made his greatest contribution t
Social Play and the Genesis of Democracy We value democracy. As citizens, we want our children to grow up holding and abiding by democratic values. We know that democracy is not easy. Democracy implies freedom, but it also implies responsibility. The balance between the two is delicate and takes wisdom that can only be gained through practice. People in a democracy are free, yet they must follow rules, cooperate with others, respect dif
Arts and Crafts: Keys to Scientific Creativity Over the course of a career, what makes one scientist more successful than another? The Scientist Project, a longitudinal study of a diverse set of scientists, revealed an unsuspected secret: arts and crafts hobbies. In 1958, UCLA psychologist Bernice Eiduson recruited forty young scientists from the Los Angeles area, mainly at UCLA and CalTech, who agreed to undergo a battery of psychological an
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