Sublime

For the bulk of human history, the most learned members of our species have wildly underestimated the human brain’s capabilities. This is understandable, since your brain occupies only about 2 percent of your body mass, and it looks like a blob of gray gelatin. Ancient Egyptians deemed it a useless organ and tugged it out of dead pharaohs through

The recent generations raised on games and otherwise glued to video screens, one neuroscientist told me, amount to an unprecedented experiment: “a massive difference in how their brains are plastically engaged in life” compared with previous generations. The long-term question is what such games will do to their neural wiring, and so to the social

One of the people who most helped me to understand some aspects of these questions was Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Jefferson Curl

brains are already organized and knowledgeable.