"But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”"

"Forget about forgetting, said Bjork. People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true."

"For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent."

"As this lab was carrying out research with a subject, someone cracked a joke, and the subject saw a crosshatch that persisted for some time. Following up on this surprise discovery, they found that laughing integrates the functioning of the two hemispheres, eliminating binocular rivalry for up to half an hour. (3)"

""This study indicates that the brain relinquishes responsibility when a trusted authority provides expertise, says Berns. "The problem with this tendency is that it can work to a person's detriment if the trusted source turns out to be incompetent or corrupt.""

"Twenty-four participants were presented with dozens of symbols that had been carefully chosen, with the help of a pilot study, to be either entirely novel, rarely encountered, or highly familiar (e.g. the division symbol). The participants' task was simply to state for each symbol whether they'd seen it prior to the experiment. A vital twist was that some of the symbols were preceded by an exceedingly brief flash - too quick to be detected consciously - of the same or a different symbol. The take-home finding was that a brief flash of an entirely novel symbol before its subsequent, longer presentation, significantly increased the likelihood that a participant would wrongly claim to have seen that symbol prior to the experiment. Indeed, novel symbols not preceded by a subliminal flash were judged to be familiar just three per cent of the time, compared with 15 per cent of the time when preceded by a subliminal flash of the same symbol."

"A new study, published online in the journal Nature, shows that the songs of isolated zebra finches evolve over multiple generations to resemble those of birds in natural colonies. These findings show that song learning in birds is not purely the product of nurture, but has a strong genetic basis, and suggest that bird song has a universal grammar, or an intrinsic structure which is present at birth. "

Translation of a Borges story. Another version here: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/wilkins.html

""We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children," writes Gopnik. "But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus." […] While this less focused form of attention makes it more difficult to stay on task - preschoolers are easily distracted - it also comes with certain advantages. In many circumstances, the lantern mode of attention can actually lead to improvements in memory, especially when it comes to recalling information that seemed incidental at the time."

"a presentation given by Matt Webb (of Schulze & Webb) to an audience of BBC designers, on 8 February 2006, as part of their annual Digital Futures 1-day conference. It’s the latest version of a Mind Hacks talk, relating material from the book to user interfaces, which I’ve given a number of times since the beginning of 2006."

"the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention."

"The two most important factors that influences how much we remember liking an experience are (1) it’s largest extreme and (2) how it ends. It’s called the peak-end algorithm. It’s why if a concert gets off to a rocky twenty-minute start but ends strong you’ll leave happy, whereas if it starts strong but has a bad final ten minutes you’ll leave disappointed."

now that's an answer!

"when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialized version of the effect of serendipity."

10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

"In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. "Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning."

the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?"

clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired

every study which has shown “spreading” essentially makes a Monty-Hall-like error, by neglecting the fact that people’s choices aren’t random; that in fact their choices teach you something.

The pre-linguistic way in which infants perceive colour may not necessarily be the foundation for colour perception later on, once a child learns language.

relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what.

a mode of graded categorization in Cognitive Science, where some members of a category are more central than others

Howard Gardner's seven distinct intelligences

150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

We’re simulating “real” in our brains during every conscious moment. This ability to simulate is also called intelligence.

To use language, people must have thought and reflected on their own interpretive frameworks and those of others

Nice summary of simple common falacies

New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “su

"We are the means by which we create meaning, our choices (or lack of choice) are a part of the unfolding pattern of the world in which we live and we need to take responsibility for them, that way lies freedom."

In experiments with monkeys, the researchers found that neural activities in the brain gradually change, even when nothing new is being learned.

confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of indu

In order to comprehend the continuous stream of cacophonies and visual stimulation that battle for our attention, humans will breakdown activities into smaller, more digestible chunks, a phenomenon that psychologists describe as "event structure perceptio

Some contestants can recall the order of a deck of cards after looking at it for 60 seconds. Learn their tricks.

"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else," said Marvin Minsky. "Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous."

developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex. The applications of this technology are broad and can be applied to solve problems in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.

focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM.

Individuals assess the likelihood of an event and try to judge whether the market is miscalibrated. The very act of buying "stock" in an outcome adjusts and calibrates the market. While any individual may be wrong, and may not be taking all the different

CAPTCHA and the ESP game

Difference # 9: The brain is a self-organizing system

psychologist Carol Dweck says people's self-theories about intelligence have a profound influence on their motivation to learn. Those who hold a "fixed" theory are mainly concerned with how smart they are—they prefer tasks they can already do well and a

the companion Web site for the book On Intelligence

See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones.

Why are IQ test scores rising around the globe?

New research is blurring the species boundary, forcing us to rethink what it is to be human.

experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems.

Are you capable of multiplying 147,631,789 by 23,674 in your head, instantly? Physicist Allan Snyder says you probably can, based on his new theory about the origin of the extraordinary skills of autistic savants

the humanist psychologist Liam Hudson looked at British schoolboys, concentrating on whether they were convergers or divergers -- his terms for two different thinking styles, characterized respectively by convergence toward "one right answer" on the one h

Change Blindness Examples