TED Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

In one of the ten top TED talks of 2016 Tim Urban takes you on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window — and encourages you to think harder about what you're really procrastinating on, before you run out of time.

Anton Mesmer and Pseudoscience

In The Infinite Monkey Cage Christmas Special Brian Cox and Robin Ince discuss the Christmas ghost story, and look at the Victorian obsession with the supernatural, how studying paranormal phenomenon went from a genuine scientific endeavour, to the realms of pseudoscience.

Meanwhile BBC Radio 4 has Philip Ball telling the story of Anton Mesmer and the rise and fall of animal magnetism. He interviews Simon Shaffer, from Cambridge University, about the role of spectacle in science and medicine in the late 18th century and Richard Wiseman about the legacy of scientific scrutiny of the claims of parapsychology.

 

No Room In My Brain

I was surprised to read even Sherlock Holmes believed in the "no more roon in my brain" myth. In A Study In Scarlet:

 "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." 

Or as Homer Simpson would say, "every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."

  

Traditionally, memory was viewed as similar to a book, which can be shelved but never changed once printed. We now think that memory is more like a word processing document – you can save it and then recall it, at which point you can adapt or even delete its contents.

Today's Independent reports on Dr Amy Milton's research using Propanolol, a beta-blocker, to treat alcoholics. The drug blocks memories that trigger relapses in aloholics. A simliar approach has also used to treat PTSD.

moonWalking with Einstein - In 165 Heartbeats from brett chapman on Vimeo.

Reading Josh Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein and like how this video sums it up mindmap style. Been trying to identify the soundtrack for days. Sounded like something from Caleb Sampson music for Errol Morris documentary Fast Cheap And Out Of Control, then thought maybe Michael Nyman. It is, of course, Preparation for the Last TV Fake by Yann Tiersen from Goodbye Lenin.

Is Google Runing Your Memory?

Not really. Wired magazine reminds us that "humans have been relying on “transactive memory” ever since the invention of language". The lead researcher Mary Sparrow admits:

It seems that much more scary in some ways, the idea that we are locating everything that we learn outside of ourselves. Does that have any impact on out ability to remember things in general? I don't think that is the case.

 As Josh Foer puts it in Moonwalking with Einstein

...over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we've gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids - a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. (p18)

Foer says in the interview below:

It's an old story. 2,500 years ago, Socrates was up in arms about this new invention called writing. And he said that once people start taking things out of their minds and putting them down on papyrus people are going to become forgetful, the culture is headed down this terrible, treacherous slope."