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Do Modern Research Methods Make Students Stupider?

I grew up a child of the library.  I borrowed books.  I read books.  I researched college research papers.  I did it all in my local public library and my campus libraries.  The library was the safe haven — the Smart Place — it was a niche where I fit in because I created my own intellectual indentations that nobody else could question unless I decided to share what I was thinking.

Children today don’t have buildings called libraries that mean the same thing to them that it means to people of my generation.  Kids today have virtual hangout places like the internets, and if they want to find something to read to reflect upon or research, they just fire up The Google and all their boring inquiries are returned unimagined.

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Why Brainstorming is an Individualistic Cloud and Not a Group Ray of Hope

When I was growing up in school, brainstorming was a popular way to force students to mingle ideas and to allegedly communicate non-judgmental bits of information. Unfortunately, if you didn’t have a proper leader for a brainstorming session, the task quickly became dull, and critical, and I always found those forced sessions to be less about new ideas and more about everyone deciding to just confirm the mainstream, mortal, status quo. I also learned to keep my mouth shut, and my contributions to a minimum, because I knew my outlier notions would be met with ridicule and misunderstanding.

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Convenience Over Capacity: Watson Will See You Now

Are we comfortable with machines being smarter and faster than us?  All machines start out at least as smart as the person who built them, but then what happens when their mechanized learning and capacity to think beings to outweigh and outgrow their human captors?

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My Two Brains

Are you a left-brain learner or a right-brain learner?  Does it matter any longer?  Should we be “whole lobe” learners — or do lateralized brains, instead of mirrored ones, better serve us?

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The Ethics of Adderall on the Average Mind

If a drug exists that creates enhanced cognitive thinking — are we required as a society of the shared common good — required to provide equal access to that medication without a prescription?

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Teaching Memory

How do we remember?  Is there an inherent danger is misremembering?  If we learn by thinking, is the preserved result of that process our saved memories?

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Mind Body Decay in Our Two Lifetimes

In a recent article — Medical Fakery and the Intentional Placebo Effect — I argued in the comments stream that our minds and our bodies are failing us faster even as medicine advances quicker than ever while we live our two lifetimes.

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