Friday Links 07-10-26

From the Web

Explaining is Difficult – Eliezer Yudkowsky has another great post over at Overcoming Bias. This one is about how we constantly underestimate the effort required to properly explain something. This sent off bells in my head as I strive to, but don’t always hit the mark in explaining, myself.

Journey Inside the Mind – Vilayanur Ramachandran talks about your brain. And how we can figure out how it works by studying people who have had injuries.

The really interesting point comes later, where he talks about synesthesia. This is a phenomenon where people’s senses get blended, creating colored sounds or hearing numbers. Even more, Ramachandran continues, this process of blending senses can be related to our ability to create and understand metaphors.

If anyone here has read my Holistic Learning e-book then some of what Ramachandran says will sound eerily familiar. I’m not sure whether I have synesthesia, but I can remember vividly being able to associate colors to songs as a kid.

From the Archives

Maximize Brainpower – Here’s an article I did several months ago about how to get the most out of your brain. I use a programming metaphor to describe how you can do just that.

From the Shelf

I’ve been reading a few books through my classes, but nothing worth mentioning on this blog. I’m still chewing through The Fountainhead, which I’m deliberately reading slowly. I find books like this to be useful more as a guide to thinking than for consuming information, so slow can be better.