Self-identified rational people take pride in the fact that they can't be easily manipulated, but of course that's the pride part of their dumb monkey brains talking. Here's an interesting study that measured whether hard-to-pronounce words were perceived as riskier than words that were easier to pr...

Have you ever googled something and thought “If only I could just ask the computer this question instead of typing in keywords, sifting through pages and pages of crap and finally find THE ANSWER” buried in one of the web pages?” There has got to be a better way. Every science fict...

Here’s one for Don and the Net Generation team to chew on or chew up. Baronness Susan Greenfield, a professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, has warned that the experience of growing up immersed in hyper-stimulating ...

HM as I knew him. I studied Cognitive Science in University and took some classes at the Montreal Neurological Institute. One brain we studied in great detail was this dude HM, who couldn’t form new memories. He died today. Peace the spork out HM. They removed areas of his brain near the hippo...

Space the Final Frontier, Nobel and Ignobel Prizes, Intelligent Machines, Jesus Sharks, Short Term Memory Loss, Why Justin’s Working On His Pecs, Warning For Bald Men, Girls Gone Math, and Another Bisphenol-A Study....

LHC Won’t Suck, Handy British Neandertals, Robo-Disco Attack!, End of the World, Jonathan Calls, Old Sand Clues, Bye-bye Birdie, Silly-Con, A Weighty Hormone, Squirrelly Sex, Croco Hears A Who, Crazy Ass Frogs, Chemical Similarities, Reducing Retardation, Hungry Hungry Black Hole, and Superpla...

On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of th...

The other day, I was reading Drawn!, the illustration and cartooning blog, and they made this post on creativity. I followed all the links and read all the comments, across all the blogs involved. I thought it was a fascinating discussion, not least because the vast majority of the participants actu...