Early in Idiot Brain, author Dean Burnett addresses a common misconception about memory. People tend to assume human memory works along the same lines as a computer’s memory: information goes in, is stored, and is retrieved at a later date when you need it. Sure, there might be trouble retrieving at times: you only have perfect recall ability if you’re Sherlock or you take narcotics like Bradley Cooper in Limitless, but all the data is in there somewhere, right? Unfortunately for the pharmaceutical industry, it’s […]
Don’t just keep it simple, make it understandable, and make me care
When Alan Alda speaks to doctors about communicating with their patients, he doesn’t start off by saying “When you talk to a patient, try not to use jargon.” Instead, he tells them a story about his appendix operation. When Alda was in Chile filming a documentary, he suffered a life-threatening problem with his appendix. He needed an end-to-end anastomosis. This meant a yard of Alda’s intestine had to be cut out. Before surgery, his operating doctor told him that something had gone wrong with Alda’s […]
A Bit Too Much Jargon for Me
Best for: People with a strong science background but who maybe stopped studying it after high school or early college, so still get most of the basics but want some more specifics. In a nutshell: Exploration of the causes of different genetic mutations in humans. Line that sticks with me: N/A Why I chose it: I was in a science and technology bookstore and the topic caught my interest. Review: What causes our genes to act up? Why are some twins conjoined? Why do some […]
If Sam Kean had been around when I went to school, I might have majored in Science
I’m not sure at what point in my adult life I decided I love science, but if I had been able to read books by Sam Kean when I was in school, I might have come to this conclusion at a much younger age. Then again, I think the interest has always been there (at one point I thought I would be a zoologist, because I liked animals), but the knowledge didn’t seem accessible to me. Whether it was because I was a girl and […]
Tongue in Cheek Medical Info for Your Needs
While my work is in history, I love to read science non-fiction. I bounce around from Mary Roach books and other things in a similar vein, and about half of my podcast listening is science based as well. When reviews of James Hamblin’s If Our Bodies Could Talk started sliding in I thought it sounded up my alley. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that Hamblin did his own audio and added that to my queue list at the library. In If Our Bodies Could Talk […]
Cracked, plain and simple.
Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com. The […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- …
- 61
- Next Page »