Almost 7% of American university students have used prescription stimulants.  Not to party all night, but to study. The cast of characters here are familiar; Adderall, Ritalin and the newest sibling, Modafinil (aka Provigil). Smart drugs, developed for the treatment of the ill, are now finding homes in the medicine cabinets of the healthy. The question is: will they be in yours?

Smart Drugs in action

Our understanding of the inner workings of the human brain has exploded over the last decade. And the drugs to treat many debilitating disorders like ADHD and narcolepsy have followed. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge.

Actions which just happen to include maintaining attention and aiding the formation of new memories.

More human than human

Take two, and call me in the future

And with the gap between rich and poor ever widening, and these drugs being expensive, are we on the cusp of a new social class, the Smart-class? Read more at veryevolved.com

Let’s say your income goes up by 2% but inflation rises by 4% at the same time, completely negating the increase. Would you rather take a 2% pay cut and have the price of things remain the same, or take the 2% salary increase with 4% inflation? Clearly both things are the same so it doesn’t matter what you choose. But when we ask this question to large numbers of people the majority always choose the salary increase. But if it makes no difference, why is there a bias?

Clearly the money illusion isn’t wholly and solely responsible for the mess we’re in now. But here’s one thing you can take to the bank: The human brain isn’t a purely rational economic machine, and it’s our weird relationship to money that we need to keep an eye on as well as the market. Read more at veryevolved.com

The world as we know it is in disruption. Maybe it’s always been in disruption, pushing us through cycles of apparent chaos so that evolution can continue and new paradigms emerge. Thanks to social technologies, we’re growing into a globally connected communication system, and seem to be heading towards a tipping point. But what is it that we’re transitioning to?

Maybe we’ve forgotten the bigger picture. The Web was never intended to be about marketing, banner ads, and spam; it was intended to be about learning, sharing resources, and attaining a deeper level of understanding of each other and the world around us. The latter is happening, albeit slowly. I wonder if reframing the experience might help us accelerate the process.

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.

I think, as a society, we have lost ourselves.

See more at emergentbydesign.com

In their paper titled ‘A Stability Bias in Human Memory: Overestimating Remembering and Underestimating Learning,’ Kornell and Bjork write: “To manage one’s own conditions of learning effectively requires gaining an understanding of the activities and processes that do and do not support learning.”

In psychology, experts use the term metacognition to talk about how people think about their own cognitive processes - in essence, thinking about thinking.

Their results led the researchers to the suggestion that people are under confident in their learning abilities and overconfident in their memories. That is, people failed to predict that they would be able to remember more words after studying more - although in reality, they learned far more — instead basing their predictions on current memory. Kornell and Bjork call this a “stability bias” in memory. Read more at www.physorg.com

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft have developed an acoustic biosensor that turns an arm into a crude touch screen.

An armband, worn around the bicep, detects minute sound waves that travel through skin when it is tapped. The researchers designed a software program that can distinguish the origin of the acoustic sounds–which vary due to slight differences in underlying bone density, mass and tissue. The system then translates these locations into button commands. A pico projector embedded in the armband projects a display–a game of Tetris or button controllers–onto a user’s palm or arm.

The researchers found that they were able to achieve 95.5% accuracy with the controllers when five points on the arm were designated as buttons. They will present their results at this year’s CHI conference next month.

See the researchers present Skinput below.

See more at www.technologyreview.com

ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school flounderedRead more at www.nytimes.com

(PhysOrg.com) — Human behavior is 93 percent predictable, a group of leading Northeastern University network scientists recently found. Distinguished Professor of Physics Albert-László Barabási and his team studied the mobility patterns of anonymous cell-phone users and concluded that, despite the common perception that our actions are random and unpredictable, human mobility follows surprisingly regular patterns. The team’s research is published in the current issue of Science magazine.

“Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population. Despite the significant differences in travel patterns, we found that most people are equally predictable,” said Barabási, who is also director of Northeastern’s world-leading Center for Complex Network Research. “The predictability represents the probability we can foresee an individual’s future whereabouts in the next hour based on his or her previous trajectory.” Read more at www.physorg.com

More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.”

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel. Read more at www.physorg.com