Neuroscience of Change

The Neuroscience of Language and Reality (the Story of your Brain, Part 2)

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” --Wittgenstein

At some point in my twenties, when I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, I decided to visit West Africa. I am white, and grew up in Florida. Anyone who tells you that racism is in the past has not been paying attention. I was drawn to see if I could understand why going to Africa had such a powerful impact on his thinking about how blacks and whites can work together.

When I got off the plane in the Gambia, I was ushered onto a bus to a fancy hotel with a fancy pool with a bar on an island. This was not what I had come to see. So I walked out the front gate. I discovered that I could make friends and stay with them. I had a notebook, and would ask in English (and later in French in Mali), how do you say, “good morning,” and “breakfast,” so on. Gradually, in each place I visited, I learned enough Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof to have very basic conversations with my hosts,...

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What's the Story With Your Brain, Part 1

A little more than six months ago, when she was not quite three, my daughter awoke very upset, saying to my partner, “Mommy, I can’t read!” Of course I can’t be sure, but it seemed she was longing to be able to simply explore her books on her own (rather than being upset because she feels pressured to read from us, say. We don’t really have timelines for what she needs to be able to do when).

One of the wondrous things about being her dad is the expansive and probing illumination of her stories. She’ll flip through a book and tell herself a story about it. We do a lot of role play. Are you the submarine? I’m the piranha. Will you be the grocer? Let’s have lunch in the park. Pretend lunch. And as other parents will confirm, these imaginings come mostly from who knows where.

Besides being part of how we learn and remember things, story may be central to healthy neural function. Previously, we discussed how oxytocin activates a kind of...

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Science: the surprising story of why it's hard

According to the dynamic philosopher of working people Eric Hoffer, “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.” But it turns out that learning is not easy. It may not even happen in the way we think it does.

Beginning thirty years ago, researcher Kevin Niall Dunbar analyzed the scientific process at four biochemistry labs at Stanford. His results are deeply unsettling.

Most of us have grown up thinking of science – and of the civilizations based on the technology made possible by it -- as an orderly process of gradual revelations about the world. Based on their observation and experience in a field, someone develops a theory. Then methodical testing leads an accumulation of experimental data to offer insights into improving the theory.

But in his research, apparently half or more of the results don’t make any sense, and are discarded, even if they indicate important new directions for the theory.

From fMRI scans, Dunbar...

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