Mindframe

In case you were wondering whether or not there is, in fact, a word for everything, allow me to tell you that polycephany , the condition of having multiple heads, is most common in snakes and tortoises. Humans, of course, tend towards a more singular arrangement. The foundational concept behind the business meeting is that bringing together more minds will ensure better results, that the ideas generated will be lit by the total of all intelligence in the room. In the abstract, it sounds reasonable, but in our own lives, we have reason to doubt. Consider how many people used to sneer at the heliocentric model of the solar system, or germ theory, or universal suffrage. Consider the Titanic. Consider the continued inexplicable success of Two and a Half Men . Whether we're talking scientific communities of yore or the modern viewing public, large groups of people can have a pretty mixed track record. So do the benefits of collaboration hold up to public scrutiny? Julia A. M...

Teamwork is at the very heart of our idea of modern life. From sports to business, it's thought to be the bedrock of success. (Look at any motivational poster.) While we may pay homage to the legend of the lone genius, the concept of the sum being greater than its parts still holds a special sway. This assumption is pretty obvious: just count the number of meeting requests on your calendar. If it's all about collaboration, why do so many meetings seem to curse you to a Sisyphean struggle, perpetually weighed down by brain-deadening hours trapped at conference tables, cursing your very existence? Or, put more constructively, if you were going to break out of the mold and build your "dream team" business meeting, what types of people should you look for? Would you be on the hunt for introverts or extroverts, analytical folks or people of exceptional IQ? Does gender matter? In a New York Times piece called "Why Some Teams are Smarter Than Others", t...

The Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci guaranteed his immortality when he literally put his name on the map—at least, if the map you’re looking at includes the Americas. (16th century European explorers were not renowned for their shyness, humility, or general reluctance to slap their names on anything that would stand still long enough.) Neuroscientist and former PhD physicist Sebastian Seung hopes to achieve a little immortality of his own by mapping the human connectome. If you’ve never heard of it before, the connectome is understood as the basic wiring diagram of the brain. It would chart out all of the main neural pathways and connections. Using standard mapping techniques, the project would have an estimated timeline of something like a trillion years. Seung is hoping to considerably shorten the schedule, aided by Google maps-style technology, crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, and a unique form of online gaming. So why map the brain? In Gareth Co...

When we consider ourselves as individuals, we tend to think in terms of a single entity with agency. In essence, I take on information through my five senses and then use my memories to inform, guide and, perhaps most importantly, predict what will happen next—or, more accurately, what might happen next. So those recollections, the stories we tell ourselves to record those experiences, are what fundamentally help us both understand ourselves and the world around us.  This all makes perfect sense, except for one problem: that’s not actually how it works, according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning economist. Kahneman says the two systems—experiencing and remembering—are not in sync. In a series of experiments, he and his team proved that your experiencing self perceives the world moment by moment, but your remembering self follows a strange phenomena that Kahneman refers to as the “peak end rule.”  Here’s how it works: our remembering selves tend to re...