Scientific American Mind Vol 14 #1 The Brain A Look Inside

Early natural philosophers speculated that our brains contained a homunculus, a kernel of self-awareness not unlike the soul that was the irreducible core of our self. This “little person” peered out through our eyes and listened through our ears and somehow made sense of the universe. Neuroscientists ejected the homunculus from our heads, however. The circuitry of our brains does not all converge on one point where the essence of ourselves can sit and ruminate.

Instead whatever makes us us emerges from countless overlapping neural processes, in the same way that a symphony emerges from the playing of an orchestra’s musical instruments. One can analyze the instruments and the techniques of the musicians or watch the conductor or even read the musical score, but the actual music cannot be found anywhere until the performance begins.

Scientific American Mind: Bored - Find Your Focus And You Could Change Your Life

I’ve never been good at waiting around for something to do. If work slackens slightly, I volunteer for new projects that I will find challenging— and the way I race down the hall from one task to the next is the subject of a lot of good-natured office humor. My shoulder bag is always stuffed with reading material, to ward off idle moments during the train ride home. Truth is, I just really, really hate being bored.

One way I recently have staved off dullness is by reading Anna Gosline’s fascinating account of the complex psychological underpinnings of what she calls “this most tedious of human emotions.” In her feature article “Bored?” she explains how multifaceted those ho-hum moments actually are, influenced by levels of attention and awareness, emotional factors, adeptness at identifying one’s own feelings, and the nature of the matters at hand. Boredom can drive some people to achieve — but those who easily experience ennui are more prone
to suffer chronic depression or drug addiction. Getting at the roots of boredom could help prevent and treat these ailments. The story begins on page 20. Surely the least boring decade in the past century was the psychedelic sixties, when so much of pop culture seemingly came under a hallucinogenic influence.

Scientific American Mind: Brighter Brains - Your Iq Is Higher Than Your Parents', Which Is Higher Than Your Grandparents' - Here Is Why

They seem normal enough. But how come Grandpa doesn’t act retarded— and Sonny is clearly no budding Einstein?

Those questions pop up when intelligence researchers look at the startling trends in IQ scores. Massive point gains occurred from one generation to the next throughout the 20th century— a phenomenon dubbed the “Flynn effect,” after psychologist James R. Flynn. The IQ gains were troubling: either today’s children are far brighter than their parents, or the tests are not good measures of intelligence. To express it another way, if we put the score of today’s average American at 100, then the Americans of 1900 had a mean IQ of 50 to 70, signaling an obviously implausible plague of mental retardation among our progenitors. Something must have happened, but what? Now Flynn himself offers answers in his article, “Solving the IQ Puzzle,” starting on page 24.

The brain is famously adaptable, altering in response to conditions in a person’s environment and to his or her life experiences. “Brain Stains,” by psychologists Kelly Lambert and Scott O. Lilienfeld, reveals the dark side of that mutability. Patients who have undergone traumatic and misdirected “therapies” can suffer mentally and emotionally damaging consequences that may persist for years. Turn to page 46 for their disturbing and important account.