The Octopus Brain [video]

Are There Things We Can Never Know ?

In a post from NPR –

Gardner allows that humans have wonderful brains, that we can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but he says there are still limits, hard limits. Just as “there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even make it understand the square root of 2,” he writes, “surely there are truths as far beyond our grasp as our grasp is beyond that of a cow.” He concedes that once upon a time humans were chimp-like and over time developed brains that cracked the “square root of 2” problem — but that doesn’t faze him. There are properties of our universe so profoundly complex that no sentient mind, no matter how enhanced, will ever understand them fully.

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Long Term Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

BusinessInsider reports –

In June 2009, The Atlantic published a cover story on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development. The project, which began in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring an astonishing range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing. Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, published Triumphs of Experience, a summation of the insights the study has yielded. Among them: “Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death. Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter.

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Researches Find Poop-throwing By Chimps Is A Sign Of Intelligence

According to PhysOrg.com –

A lot of people who have gone to the zoo have become the targets of feces thrown by apes or monkeys, and left no doubt wondering about the so-called intellectual capacity of a beast that would resort to such foul play. Now however, researchers studying such behavior have come to the conclusion that throwing feces, or any object really, is actually a sign of high ordered behavior. Bill Hopkins of Emory University and his colleagues have been studying the whole process behind throwing and the impact it has on brain development, and have published their results in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Hopkins and his team have focused their research on chimpanzees, mainly due they say, to the fact that chimps are our closet living relative and that they are the only other species besides humans that regularly throw things with a clear target in mind. He and his team have been watching chimps in action for several years and comparing their actions with scans of their brains to see if there were any correlations between those chimps that threw a lot, and those that didn’t or whether they’re accuracy held any deeper meaning. Surprisingly, they found that chimps that both threw more and were more likely to hit their targets showed heightened development in the motor cortex, and more connections between it and the Broca’s area, which they say is an important part of speech in humans. The better chimp throwers, in other words, had more highly developed left brain hemispheres, which is also, non-coincidently, where speech processing occurs in people. Such findings led the term to suggest that the ability to throw is, or was, a precursor to speech development in human beings.

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Night Owls Smarter Than Early Birds

This report from PsychologyToday makes complete sense to me.

Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late. A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. In a new paper, Kanazawa replicates the finding and provides a theoretical grounding. Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts.

original source

Logic Test

I like this quick little logic test – I got all 15 questions correct.

Take the Arm-chair Logic Test.