Quick heads up: the lat­est edi­tion of Encephalon brain & mind blog car­ni­val is Here, nicely hosted by Neuroskeptic.

New edi­tion of Encephalon, the selec­tion of recent blog posts on brain & mind top­ics, this time hosted by Mike at Ion­ian Enchant­ment. Enjoy Encephalon’s #75 edi­tion!

(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine.)

Chang­ing our Minds

By imag­in­ing many pos­si­ble worlds, argues nov­el­ist and psy­chol­o­gist Keith Oat­ley, fic­tion helps us under­stand our­selves and others.

–By Keith Oatley

For more than two thou­sand years peo­ple have insisted that read­ing fic­tion is good for you. Aris­to­tle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschy­lus, Sopho­cles, and Euripi­des, which we would now call fiction—is a more seri­ous busi­ness than his­tory. His­tory, he argued, tells us only what has hap­pened, whereas fic­tion tells us what can hap­pen, which can stretch our moral imag­i­na­tions and give us insights into our­selves and other peo­ple. This is a strong argu­ment for schools to con­tinue to focus on the lit­er­ary arts, not just his­tory, sci­ence, and social studies.

But is the idea of fic­tion being good for you merely wish­ful think­ing? The mem­bers of a small research group in Toronto—Maja Dji­kic, Ray­mond Mar, and I—have been work­ing on the prob­lem. We have turned the idea into ques­tions. In what ways might read­ing fic­tion be good for you? If it is good for you, why would this be? And what is the psy­cho­log­i­cal func­tion of art generally?

Through a series of stud­ies, we have dis­cov­ered that fic­tion at its best isn’t just enjoy­able. It mea­sur­ably enhances our abil­i­ties to empathize with other peo­ple and con­nect with some­thing larger than ourselves.

Pos­si­ble selves, pos­si­ble worlds

Peo­ple often think that a fic­tion is some­thing untrue, but this is wrong. The word derives from the Latin fin­gere, to make. As some­thing made, fic­tion is dif­fer­ent from some­thing dis­cov­ered, as in physics, or from some­thing that hap­pened, as in the news. But this does not mean it is false. Fic­tion is about pos­si­ble selves in pos­si­ble worlds.

In terms of 21st-century psy­chol­ogy, we might best see fic­tion as a kind of sim­u­la­tion: one that runs not on com­put­ers, but on minds. Such men­tal sim­u­la­tion unfolds on two levels.

The first level involves sim­u­lat­ing the minds of other peo­ple: imag­in­ing what they are think­ing and feel­ing, which devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gists call “the­ory of mind.” The theory-of-mind sim­u­la­tion is like a watch, which is a small model that sim­u­lates Read the rest of this entry »

Dave hosts a fun iCephalon 2009 Keynote address (AKA Encephalon 72), a col­lec­tion of the best brain and mind blog posts of the last cou­ple weeks. Enjoy!

The Neu­roan­thro­pol­ogy blog team has just pub­lished one of the most com­plete and high-quality edi­tions of Encephalon brain & mind blog car­ni­val in months. Enjoy!:
Encephalon #71: Big Night

Three excel­lent new edi­tions of these blog carnivals:

- Encephalon at Neu­roskep­tic: brain and mind topics.

- Grand Rounds at Run­ning a Hos­pi­tal: over­all health and med­i­cine, this week with spe­cial theme “when things go awry”.

- Change of Shift at Emergi­Blog: nurs­ing and related health­care topics.

A cou­ple of very well curated col­lec­tions of recent blog posts:

Encephalon #64: hosted by Neu­r­o­critic, cov­er­ing neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy. Please make sure to visit when you have some time to spare…because you will quickly become addicted to the qual­ity con­tent and superb presentation.

It’s Grand Rounds, What Do You Think? GOSH!: hosted by Kim at Emergi­Blog, with an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary, “Napoleon Dyna­mite”, frame. Doesn’t seem to make sense? well, pay a visit.

In 1993, Para­mount Pic­tures released Search­ing for Bobby Fis­cher, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin’s early chess suc­cess as he embarks on a jour­ney to win his first National chess cham­pi­onship. This movie had the effect of weak­en­ing his love for the game as well as the learn­ing process. His pas­sion for learn­ing was reju­ve­nated, how­ever, after years of med­i­ta­tion, and read­ing phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy. With this rekin­dling of the learn­ing process, Wait­zkin took up the mar­tial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, win­ning the 2004 push hands world cham­pi­onship at the age of 27.

After read­ing Joshua’s most recent book The Art of Learn­ing, I thought of a mil­lion top­ics I wanted to dis­cuss with him–topics such as being labelled a “child prodigy”, bloom­ing, cre­ativ­ity, and the learn­ing process. Thank­fully, since I was pro­fil­ing Wait­zkin for an arti­cle I was for­tu­nate enough to get a chance to have such a con­ver­sa­tion with him. I hope you find this dis­cus­sion just as provoca­tive and illu­mi­nat­ing as I did.

The Child Prodigy

S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?

J. This is a com­pli­cated ques­tion that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My rela­tion­ship to the game had become externalized-by pres­sures from the film about my life, by los­ing touch with my nat­ural voice as an artist, by mis­takes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my rela­tion­ship to learn­ing is the idea that we should be as organic as pos­si­ble. We need to cul­ti­vate a deeply refined intro­spec­tive sense, and build our rela­tion­ship to learn­ing around our nuance of char­ac­ter. I stopped doing this and fell into cri­sis from a sense of alien­ation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started med­i­tat­ing, study­ing phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy, and ulti­mately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.

S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?

J. I have never con­sid­ered myself a prodigy. Oth­ers have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embrac­ing the bat­tle, lov­ing the game, and over­com­ing adver­sity. Grow­ing up as Read the rest of this entry »

Edge’s Ques­tion of the Year is,

“What will change every­thing? What game-changing sci­en­tific ideas and devel­op­ments do you expect to live to see?”

A cou­ple of sci­en­tists respond on areas close to our field:

- Con­trol­ling Brain Plas­tic­ity (by Leo Chalupa)
– The first major upgrade of the human brain and the mind it gen­er­ates since the Pleis­tocene (by Gre­gory Paul)

You can read those and many other fas­ci­nat­ing answers at Edge’s Ques­tion of the Year.

Wel­come to the 61st edi­tion of Encephalon, the blog car­ni­val that offers some of the best neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog posts every other week.

We do have an excel­lent set of arti­cles today. cov­er­ing much ground. Enjoy the reading:

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Neu­ro­science and Society

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Alzheimer’s Dis­ease and Neu­rocog­ni­tive Health Read the rest of this entry »