Brain-machine interfaces have come a long way in the last decade. Now a group of computer scientists and neuroscientists from the University of San Francisco have taken things a step further. The researchers used two neural networks to decode their participant’s brain activity and determine what they were saying. What they achieved was real-time translation…
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You have to pay attention to your goals if you ever want to achieve them. But while you pay for this attention with your time, there is something else you sacrifice when you decide to attend to something: everything else you could be attending to. When we sit down and write, we are also deciding…
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Ulysses is said to have tied himself to the flagpole of his ship, so that as he sailed past the sirens and heard their beautiful voices, he wouldn’t be able to steer the ship into the rocks trying to find them. When it comes to self-control, tactics of this variety seem to be the most…
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Someone told my younger self I should learn something new every day. The rest of your time can be filled with monotonous activities, but as long as you learn one little thing, you’re growing. Learning one thing a day is a piece of cake now. Considering how easy it is to access to new and…
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The term ‘deepfake’ has only been around a couple of years, but there is a lot of interest—good and bad—in it’s potential. What’s a deepfake? It’s a fake image or video produced using artificial intelligence. Feed enough data into an algorithm, and it will learn to create eerily realistic fabrications of whatever it was trained…
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To make a better tomorrow, sometimes we have to put up with a not-so-nice today. Long-term goals mean rejecting many of the things that tempt us in the moment. We don’t want to be a slave to impulses and influences, so we fight against them, to varying levels of success. As Walter Mischel writes in the…
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A shipowner is caught in two minds. His ship is showing signs of wear and tear, and he knows that eventually it’ll need to get repaired, but it takes time and money, and it’s scheduled to depart for the seas. He manages to quell his concerns, coming to the sincere conclusion that it is fit…
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Metacognition is often described as ‘thinking about thinking.’ It’s about monitoring and controlling your mental processes. When you’re learning something, if you ask yourself questions like “how well do I understand this?” or “will I remember this?” you are engaging in metacognition. “It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of…
Leave a CommentHappiness is a result of effort, but effort that’s directed towards meaningful goals, not necessarily the goal of being happy. Daniel Kahneman makes a distinction between two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self lives only in the present, and will be happy when you indulge in pleasures like a cold beer on…
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“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” —George Orwell It’s easy to have an opinion without fully understanding why we have it. We experience things and they imprint a certain feeling within us, a feeling we can express with a few…
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