The Ed's Up #156

The Weak Evidence Behind Brain-Training Games

"The team, most of whom have worked on brain-training themselves but have not received money from the industry, spent two years reviewing every single scientific paper cited by leading brain-training companies in support their products—374 in total. Their review was published today, and it makes for stark reading. The studies, they concluded, suffer from a litany of important weaknesses, and provide little or no evidence that the games improve anything other than the specific tasks being trained. People get better at playing the games, but there are no convincing signs that those improvements transfer to general mental skills or to everyday life. “If you want to remember which drugs you have to take, or your schedule for the day, you’re better off training those instead,” says Simons." (Image: Edgar Su) 
 

Humans Won't Ever Live Far Beyond 115 Years

"Jeanne Louise Calment spent all of her incredibly long life in Arles, France. She was born there in February 1875 and died there in August 1997. At the time of her death, she was the oldest person ever recorded—and she still is. Perhaps she always will be. For years, people have been saying that the first human who will live to 150 has already been born. That’s unlikely, say Jan Vijg, Xiao Dong, and Brandon Milholland, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After looking at demographic data from the last century, they think that human lifespan has a hard ceiling at around 115 years. A few rare individuals like Calment may surpass that limit, if only slightly, but on average, our species will not." (Image: Jean-Paul Pelissier) 
 

Why Do Bigger-Brained Animals Have Longer Yawns?

"The animals on his list were chosen for a reason. They had all appeared in a 2005 paper on brain evolution, which listed their brain weight, and the number of neurons in their cortex—the outer layer of the brain, which governs our most important mental skills. Using the videos they amassed, Gallup’s team showed that these two brain traits are strikingly correlated with the length of an animal’s yawn, irrespective of the creature’s body size or mouth size. Put it this way: If you take a mammal and time its yawn, you can reasonably predict how heavy its brain is and how many cortical neurons they have. “We were just really blown out of the water,” says Gallup. “It’s such a strong predictor.” (Image: Chaiwat Subprasom) 
 

Why Crested Penguins Always Lay Doomed Eggs

"They produce two in any given breeding season. The first—let’s call it the A-egg—is always smaller than the second, or B-egg. It’s smaller by between 18 and 57 percent, a greater difference than in any other bird. Because it’s smaller, the A-egg is almost always doomed. The mother penguin might kick it out of her nest. She might refuse to incubate it. On the off-chance that both eggs hatch, only one of the two chicks ever survives to become a fledgling, and it’s invariably the larger B-chick." (Image: Pete Oxford) 
 

More good reads

• “I think we are definitely losing ground to these algorithms." On AI's black box problem, by Davide Castelvecchi.
• Seth Mnookin reviews the controversy over the recent book Patient H.M., in a fair, incisive and thoughtful piece
• "It is a literary Sharknado of and error and self-satisfaction." E. J. Spode crucifies Tom Wolfe’s travesty of a book.
• “I don’t need to know who Ferrante is because I already know. I never felt like she was hidden.” On the dubious ethics of revealing a pseudonymous author’s name. By Anonymous.
• A Q&A about scheduling naps in space. By Sarah Kaplan.
• And finally, this entire beautiful, heartbreaking Twitter thread from Katie Hinde on her father, PTSD, and veterans is well worth reading.