#cognitive-shuffling

#cognitive-shuffling

The terminology of day science and night science, introduced by François Jacob, helps scientists navigate challenges in the lab by encouraging a shift in mindset towards creativity and abstract thinking.

Surveys illustrate that most Americans rank themselves as above average in everything from leadership ability to accuracy in self-assessment, despite the statistical impossibility of this belief.

"I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object," says Varun Wadia, highlighting the dual capability of visual perception and imagination.

Paul Churchland is a naturalistic philosopher who has written widely on philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. His primary focus has been on the neurosciences, particularly engaging with insights from artificial neural networks since 1986.

You settle in for a quick scroll through your feed, maybe just to unwind for a minute or two. But somewhere between a cooking hack and a clip you've already forgotten, forty minutes vanished. It's all a blur. Welcome to the era of infinite content and finite attention, where our brains are working overtime just to keep up with the deluge.

The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that's the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression? The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you'll be far more persuasive than you've ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.