Richard and Temple Grandin have co-authored a book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, which is just out and which you should definitely and immediately buy. Before you do, Jessa and Ann have some questions. Ann: Richard, this subject is a departure for you. What is the subject, anyway? Richard: The immediate subject is the […]
Mind/Brain
Last November, I spent the hottest hours of a West African afternoon camped outside Tamba Aruna’s office. He’s a slight, soft-spoken man who listens to the sorrows of others each day. His job – mental health supervisor at the emergency clinic operated by Doctors without Borders (or MSF) in Sierra Leone – makes Aruna a […]
One of the annoying things about parenting is that experience is always ahead of science: Those of us raising kids today are dealing with circumstances, and dilemmas, that researchers will need years to understand. Maybe that’s why parents fortunate enough to afford iPads are fretting so much about how and how much our kids use […]
What is stupidity? That’s the question I set out to answer this week for New Scientist. The idea was to look at the science of stupidity, but it took me a good couple of weeks to stop hitting brick walls in my research. Respectable scientists don’t like to talk about stupidity. “Stupidity is an evaluative […]
I was browsing online a couple of months ago when I came across the headline, “Petula Clark Turns 80.” What? That’s not possible. I remember when she was part of the British invasion, an icon of Swinging London, a mainstay of the Top Forty. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing “Downtown” or “Don’t Sleep in the Subway” […]
When Rosemary Pryde was four years old, 63 years ago, she lost her hearing. No one knows exactly why: maybe the high fever, maybe the medications, maybe genetic – her father and his mother lost their hearing as adults. She didn’t lose her hearing completely; she had some residual in both ears. When she was […]
To the layman, the website for BabyPlus might seem plausible. The company sells devices that supposedly make babies smarter by playing sounds to them while still in the womb. The site claims that by strapping a speaker playing loud rhythmic sounds to her belly, an expectant mother ensures her child will be more relaxed, nurse […]
In early January, the sidewalks in my neighborhood are lined with discarded Christmas trees. It’s the collective holiday hangover trash, and quite frankly it makes me sad; the trees mark the moment of winter where all that is left are several cheerless months of cold and drudgery. My dog, however, goes apeshit over them. He […]