Grit Fuels the Cognitive Engine on the Road to Success

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Grit Fuels the Cognitive Engine on the Road to Success

What do successful people have in common? Although cognitive abilities are often thought to play a leading role in achieving one’s academic or career goals, other factors like environmental conditions, hard work, and persistence in the face of failure might shape our skillset and influence success in a given path. Even Charles Darwin thought that intelligence -although helpful- had a limited contribution to success in humans compared with attributes like "grit", defined as “the passion and perseverance for long-term goals of personal significance”

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Male versus female brains: persistent myth or inconvenient truth?

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Male versus female brains: persistent myth or inconvenient truth?

Science has been used as a tool of women’s oppression at least since Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection, and scientific rationalization of sexist perspectives has not yet fallen to the ash heap of history. Attempts to legitimize misogyny with neuroscience are in fact so common that Cordelia Fine, a historian of science, has coined the term “neurosexism” to describe the practice. Here we consider a 2015 scientific study from Daphna Joel and colleagues, “Sex Beyond the Genitalia: The human brain mosaic,” which explicitly takes up arms against neurosexism. Can we define brains as “male” or “female” in the first place? If so, what do we gain from doing so? Join us as we explore the intersection of misogyny and scientific data.

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Can we reverse engineer the brain like a computer?

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Can we reverse engineer the brain like a computer?

Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? Here we revisit a 2017 paper claiming that modern neuroscience approaches wouldn’t even allow us to understand the simplest “brain” (a microprocessor) and we re-evaluate that critique in the context of some exciting new research.

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