A wonderful 11-minute video from Scientific American on neuroscience and magic:

Marshall McCluhan once famously said, “First, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” As a professional futurist, I have been trying to explain how some of our tools are getting exponentially more powerful. In turn, these tools are accelerating the advances that will soon shape our future and, by virtue of their…

A series of newspapers and Internet sites are reporting on new research, profiled in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that multi-taskers are worse at multi-tasking. Before jumping on the bandwagon and decrying the scourge of multi-tasking, I would encourage you to read this thoughtful post from one of…

Read the following sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-IC STUDY COMBINED WITHTHE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. Now count aloud the F's in that sentence. Important, count them ONLY ONCE: do not go back and count them again.   To find out the correct answer and learn if you passed the test, click on…

Quick. I want you to say aloud what color you see in every word in the chart to the right. Do not say the word you read. (For example, sometimes the word "white" will be in the color red so you would say "red.") The quiz, better known as the Stoop task, is a classic…

Yesterday, I encouraged people interested in unlearning to "trust but verify" their instincts. One area where this technique might save you some money is to have a friend or loved one give you a blind taste of your favorite (and perhaps expensive) wine or coffee along with that of a lesser brand. Interestingly, a few years ago researchers…

I understand the appeal of saying something is either black or white (and thus denying all the various shades of grey in between). Numerous debates occur everyday. For example, some people argue that  homosexuality is genetic in nature. Others claim it is a nurtured condition. In spite of the efforts of supporters on both sides of the…

At the end of yesterday's post on learning to unlearning, I posed the following question: How does one learn a new gestalt? To begin a person must start by unlearning some things. But what things do we unlearn? For our purposes, a good place to start might be to imagine what a course on unlearning what…

Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss. You shouldn’t. Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a…

Last summer, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, wrote an excellent article entitled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes Scientific Method Obsolete” in which he convincingly argued that massive amounts of data, in combination with sophisticated algorithms and super powerful computers, offer mankind a whole new way of understanding the world. Anderson believes…