Good words

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. - George Santayana

Frogs and ears

Not much to do with workplace learning, but I loved this story about how pure research can lead to useful things -- in this case, the discovery of a frog's ability to block out extraneous sounds while listening for a mating call, and what it might mean for hearing aids of the future.

(By the way, the image comes from an online store called Frog Nirvana, which sells an unimaginable variety of merchandise featuring frogs: rugs, wind chimes, staplers, birdbaths, music boxes...and, of course, earrings.)

Cyberspace -- you gotta love it.

Blog crawl

Some interesting stuff on blogs:

How sleep, practice and testing consolidate memory on Sharp Brains.

More on power naps from the Boston Globe.

Everyone wants leadership development, but what are leaders without followers? Harvard Business School's blog reviews the new book Followership by Barbara Kellerman.

And the wonderful Jonah Lehrer in "Grape Expectations: What wine can tell us about the nature of reality":

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Enjoy!

Good words

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back. - Maya Angelou

Old dogs and new tricks

Could walking into a room and forgetting why you came in there actually be a sign of wisdom? This New York Times article suggests older people have wider (not longer) attention spans, enabling them to think more creatively, retain more detail, and solve problems more effectively.

Take that, whippersnappers!

FHA Old Dog with New Tricks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Good words

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. – George Bernard Shaw

Son of my laptop ate my brain...

The wonderful Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. weighs in on our fading ability to sit patiently and read. Like me, Pitts has been finding himself dozing off over material that would have been a treat a few years ago.

I've decided to get back to reading books, at least an hour a day. (Shocking to make a program of something that used to be a guilty pleasure!) I hope to renew my ability to sit still and lose myself in nuanced material, without craving a hyperlink to another story, and then another, and then just one more...

Join me? Let me know how it's going for you. I'm heading back to Pierre and Natasha, and that little rat Napoleon.