How human history is shaped by neural anatomy “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each seeks to rule without the other. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, a movement erupted in Europe that Isaiah Berlin (in
How our biases and expectations keep shaping our results The 16th century was a turbulent time for Europe. With Luther’s reformation and Henry’s separation of the English from the Catholic Church (the original Brexit, if you will), the hold Rome had on Europe for a thousand years was starting
In times of increasing division between the Right and the Left, I want to spend a couple of minutes leaving all political tension and controversy aside, approaching the whole problem of Left and Right from a somewhat different angle. In answering this question, I will touch upon phone calls
..and how they can help us understand our DNA Photo by Brian Kostiuk - @BriKost on Unsplash Turing machines are the ultimate computers. A Universal Turing machine can compute so well, it can even compute other Turing machines that can then compute everything else (that is, every problem that
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay After the mildly clickbaity title, I have to start out with some honesty: we don’t really know if the brain is a quantum computer or not. But as with many a question we don’t know the answer to, thinking about them can still
Learning from one of mankind’s greatest geniuses What did the inventor of the helicopter, the inventor of scuba diving gear, the first man to design a parachute, and the first person to correctly describe the blood flows in the heart have in common? They all painted a little bit
…how the brain creates conceptual spaces By José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior [Public domain] We think every day, but it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly we mean by the word. When we try to understand thought, we have to grasp thought by thinking about thought itself, which feels ever
A case for overcoming the p-value Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash When is a scientific discovery really a discovery? When does a hunch about something that could be true turn into something mankind collectively holds to be true? The world is complicated, and it is hard to come
...how the physics of life could explain why we haven’t met any aliens yet It is still weird for me to think that humans just happened to wake up here on earth one day without having a clue where we came from. We find ourselves thrown into this world
How self-learning AI could re-define our concepts of creativity The triumph of Google’s AlphaGo in 2016 against Go world champion Lee Sedol by 4:1 caused quite the stir that reached far beyond the Go community, with over a hundred million people watching while the match was taking place. It
