Cluttered = Smart

For some people, “Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD) can be a real problem. I’ve got it and I don’t view it as a “disorder”, even though as I’ve written, my particular flavor of ADD can sometimes throw up a speed bump. Anyway, now I can point to some science on scatter-brains. I recently finished Steven Johnson’s Where Good Things Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – a recommended read, by the way. In his chapter on Serendipity, Johnson talks about Robert Thatcher’s 2007 study in which he looked at phase-lock (when neurons are firing at the same frequency) and noise (when they are not synchronized) in brains of children by performing EEGs and then giving them IQ tests. The study has the inspiring title of “Intelligence and EEG Phase Reset: A Two Compartmental Model of Phase Shift and Lock” if you are really adventurous, masochistic, or really like reading academic papers. I guess I'll go with the first descriptor - I read it and I'm really glad I’m not into research. For those who want to cut to the chase, Thatcher found that:

Phase shift duration (40 – 90 msec) was positively related to intelligence and the phase lock duration (100 – 800 msec) was negatively related to intelligence.
In layman’s terms, the more disorganized the brain, the smarter someone is. The noise appears to be necessary to help the brain find new connections between neurons. Celebrate disorder!

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A breast is a breast is a breast

According to PolicyMic,

Ladies of New York , you are free to walk bare-breasted through the city! New York City's 34,000 police officers have been instructed that, should they encounter a woman in public who is shirtless but obeying the law, they should not arrest her. This is a good step towards gender parity in public spaces.
So, a woman's bare breast should be treated no differently than a man's breast under the law. Nonetheless, the fact that this NY law is so contentious (or at least newsworthy), means that a breast is not the same as an arm or a leg, especially a woman's breast. I explore the existential connotations of breasts here.

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Limited Levels of human intentionality

There are many limits to human cognition. One of those is limits to levels of intentionality. Mark Kohn explains at Aeon, referring to the work of Robin Dunbar:

As Dunbar has pointed out, Shakespeare’s Othello requires audiences to believe ‘that Iago intends that Othello imagines that Desdemona is in love with Cassio’. That takes them to four levels of ‘intentionality’, or mental representation, but not to an especially compelling story. To bind the narrative spell, Shakespeare has Iago persuade Othello that Cassio reciprocates Desdemona’s feelings. This raises audiences to a fifth level, which is about the natural limit for most people. (In order to tell the tale, Shakespeare himself would have been operating at the sixth level, which is beyond most of us.)

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Inventing gods to control the things that scare us

Why would someone invent a god? There are lots of conceivable reasons. One might be lonely, scared or feeling lost, and belief in could provide comfort. Two books I’m reading have provided a different but consistent perspective on this question of why people invent gods. One of the books, Thinking,…

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Modern paradox: Well-informed futility

SANDRA STEINGRABER (part of an interview with Bill Moyers):

Yeah. Well-informed futility is an idea that psychologists hit upon in the 1960s, specifically to explain why the people watching television news about the Vietnam War came to feel more and more futile about it. Whereas people who watched less television felt less futile. So it seemed like a paradox, right? The more informed you are, you think of knowledge as power. But in fact, there is a way in which knowledge can be incapacitating. And so the psychologists went further and now have applied this to the environmental crisis and point out to us that whenever there's a problem that seems big and overwhelming, climate change would be one, and at the same time, it's not apparent that your own actions have any meaningful agency to solve that problem, you're filled with such a sense of despair or guilt or rage that it becomes unbearable. And so my response to that is basically what the book Raising Elijah is all about. So I try to take well-informed futility as my starting point and let people know that there is a way out of this. But because we can't -- I can't honestly tell you that the problem is less bad than it is, the response has to be that we scale up our actions. So the problem is huge. And so our actions have to be huge as well.

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