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Need to memorize something ridiculous for that big midterm coming up? Want to impress your friends or a potential mate at the next party you attend after said midterm? Take some notes from one Ron White. The tips may be from “The Art of Manliness”, but men and women alike can benefit from mental mapping. Enjoy!

An interesting article on a meta-study comprised of 93 different studies. I hardly put full trust in many results that are produced by brain scanners, but I think meta-studies are the most reliable source of studies that rely on scanners. The basic results: “Human neuroimaging studies have convincingly shown that the brain areas involved in aesthetic responses to artworks overlap with those that mediate the appraisal of objects of evolutionary importance, such as the desirability of foods or the attractiveness of potential mates.”

Here’s a fascinating book that I read over this past summer. Running in different ways both parallel and contrary to Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, Rethinking Innateness reexamines the way we should think about development, behavior, and language acquisition. While staying pleasantly humble and rational, the authors do not attempt to overreach the boundaries set by the deficit of research, still questionable hypotheses, and lack of suitable technology in this relatively new school of thought. 

The basic principles of book state that rather than an expressed “rule” encoded in the genome for specific behaviors, developments, and changes in the brain, there are parameters that govern individual neurons, systems of neurons, and perhaps regions of the brain as a whole. These parameters allow neurons to be plastic in the way they are interacting with each other.

The way the balance between limits and room for change is effective for development is best fleshed out (but still very preliminarily) is with language acquisition. Universal Grammar suggests that rules of language are hard-wired into the brain, but Connectionist Theory uses the change in the “weight” of neurons (basically the flexibility and eventually more-or-less settling of the transmission and reception of neural signals) to account for the differences in language across humanity, and the parameters of possible “weights” to explain the underlying grammatical structures seen across all known languages. 

To attempt to further explain the theories they flesh out, the way they account for irregularities in the rules of language, and the way they have tested these hypotheses (basically they use computer models set up like mock-brains) would be difficult and impractical to here, but take a dive into this book and discover for yourself! It did not convince me to join “their side” (they would cringe at the idea of UG and Connectionist “sides”), but it did give me a valuable new perspective on the human mind.