Mindframe

A number of years ago I had the amazing good fortune to meet the legendary blues piano man Cornbread Harris. Though severely hampered by arthritis, this 86-year-old phenom still makes his living playing some of the most soulful music you’ll ever hear. Although he didn’t—and still doesn’t—teach piano, I managed to talk him into giving me a few lessons. As you might expect, I ended up learning far more from Cornbread than just piano music.  Once I showed up at his house on a particularly bone-chilling Minnesota winter afternoon, knocked on his door and waited. And waited. And waited. After what seemed like an eternity, Cornbread finally opened the door. I rushed inside only to find Cornbread clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. He summed it up thusly: “Hey, I can either open the door or put on my pants, I can’t do both.” What Cornbread had articulated was a perfect example of binary selection. One of the reasons it’s so hard sometimes to order off a menu or pick a...

Breaking through barriers: we humans love it! Not necessarily putting ourselves at risk, but living vicariously through someone else, especially if we can do it far out of harm’s way. Not so long ago, it was said that running a sub four-minute mile was impossible. After all, human endurance had its limits. The lungs and heart could only produce so much blood-rich oxygen, and the muscles could only metabolize what the lungs and heart could deliver. For many years, a good number of athletes had tried to defy the presumed laws of human mechanics and squeak out a mile in less than 240 seconds. The net result was always the same: failure. Which is why nobody’s name comes to mind when we think of the almost four-minute mile crowd. Then on May 6th, 1954, a tall unassuming lad from Great Britain named Roger Bannister came along and blew the impossible goal away with a time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. It made international news. He became an overnight sensation. But here’s what’s int...

Located in the mountains of southwestern Siberia, the Denisova Cave takes its name from a Russian hermit named Denis, rumored to have lived there in the 18th century. When some intriguing bones were discovered in this cavern, the moniker derived from his long-dead hermit would gain a new use: as a shorthand for a stunning discovery about the world of our early human ancestors. In 2008, Russian researchers discovered the finger bone of a young humanoid female. It was the wrong shape to come from a Homo sapien, but when scientists sequenced the DNA, it didn't seem to belong to a Neanderthal, either. They had found what appears to be an entirely separate group of early hominids whose time on this planet briefly overlapped with ours. A genetic cousin to us, and a genetic sister to the Neanderthal. They had found the Denisovans. Where early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals split into separate species some 440,000 years ago, Denisovans didn't branch off from the Neanderthals unti...

One of the most disorienting ideas in Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is just how susceptible humans are to priming. Kahneman describes an experiment by psychologist John Bargh, in which students at New York University—mostly between the ages of 18 to 22—had to arrange sets of five words into four-word sentences. Half of the students were given words with a decidedly elderly slant: Florida, bingo, arthritis, and so on. The other half were given words with no real theme. When the students were done, the experimenters measured how quickly it took them to get up and walk out the door. Without being aware of it, the students given "old person" words moved significantly slower. Creepy, right? It gets creepier. Bargh did another experiment, but this time half the group got rudeness-themed words ("abrupt") and half got politeness-themed words ("patient"). When the test was over, the student was instructed to...