For children and youth with learning disabilities, school is complicated and back to school can be very different. Academic performance is interrupted by any number of difficulties, and for some students, expectations of social etiquette and self-sufficiency frequently create an environment ripe for true catastrophes.
The potential economic benefit of trained mathematicians and scientists may be obvious to policy makers, and as scientists we can appreciate this. It can be difficult to envision how a third grader's piano lessons will lead to future economic gains; however, the hidden benefits of language and music training on cognitive health and brain function should not be overlooked. It's time to put what's "extra" back into the curriculum and embrace arts programming in schools as an essential part of building and maintaining cognitive health both in the present and into the future.
Cognitive psychologists have discovered that our brains reduce women to their sexual body parts, and treat those parts as objects. The data confirms what many of us have suspected all along: we objectify women without even thinking about it. But does that mean that sexism is an inevitable result of our physiology? That's not so easy to answer.
The boundary between human and machine is softening. The first cyborgs have emerged -- much sooner than scientists would have predicted 30 years ago. We used to think having a device implanted in your skull made you a cyborg and wearing a pair of digital glasses did not. But to the brain, the distinction is arbitrary. Soon we may really have to answer the question: where does "me" end, and "my machine" begin?
While the world celebrates the discovery of the Higgs boson, these scientists are hard at work on one of the most profound mysteries left: Why, and how, did humans become conscious? Until we can figure out what consciousness physically is, there won't be any consensus on what function it serves, or indeed whether it serves any function at all.