Learning

38 articles
  • clinton trump_HERO

    Health

    How Aphasic Patients Understood the Presidential Debate

    In The President’s Speech, a 1985 essay by the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, he observes a group of people with aphasia, a language disorder, as they laugh uproariously at the television. The cause of their amusement is an unnamed actor-turned United States president, presumably Ronald Reagan, addressing his audience: “There he was, the […]

  • meerkats eating scorpions

    Psychology

    Social Learning in Nature Is Ubiquitous

    In 1898, American psychologist Edward Thorndike published a seminal dissertation on animal intelligence. Thorndike, then at Columbia University, had spent hours experimenting with cats and special contraptions of his own design: puzzle boxes, confined spaces the cats could only escape by, for example, pawing at levers in order to trigger a release mechanism. Once out, […]

  • blind math_HERO

    Math

    Why Blind People Are Better at Math

    Bernard Morin developed glaucoma at an early age and was blind by the time he was six years old. Despite his inability to see, Morin went on to become a master topologist—a mathematician who studies the intrinsic properties of geometric forms in space—and earned renown for his visualization of an inside-out sphere. For sighted people, […]

  • Guy polyhedra_HERO

    Math

    An “Infinitely Rich” Mathematician Turns 100

    Richard Guy achieved his status as a mathematical titan by working away as a self-described amateur, though he pushes the boundaries of that definition.

  • Article Image

    Physics

    5 Paradoxical Time Travel Stories

    Can you imagine a time before we dreamed about time travel? The idea of altering an unpleasant future disclosed by an oracle, and the associated paradoxes of Fate, have been with us for millennia; but before H.G. Wells’ The Time Traveller, in 1895, the concept of time travel was wispy and of very little cultural […]

  • galactic tick day_HERO

    Astronomy

    Today Is “Galactic Tick Day”!

    Nearly a quarter of Americans still believe in Ptolemy’s idea that the sun goes around Earth. Yet, every year, these people presumably cheer on December 31 to mark the New Year, another successful trip of Earth around the sun. It’s likely not hypocrisy, just ignorance. But if much of the general public still doesn’t get […]