Learning links

Good stuff on learning from various blogs:

From Cognitive Daily: how using gestures help us learn. The article describes an experiment with children, but I'd suggest it works for adults, too. And here's how an eye exercise can improve scores on a memorization test, at least for the right-handed.

From The Frontal Cortex: what's it like to be a baby, with a wonderful first comment about tight vs. open focus. And more on focus and creativity in a post about neuroenhancing drugs. Comment #2 is especially interesting here.

From Developing Intelligence: what happens to memories when we forget them (kind of technical, but fascinating nevertheless).

Enjoy!

Good words

Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question. ...The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn.
...you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

No foolin'

One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn’t know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings, blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don’t perceive. - Jonah Lehrer