Rohan Gunatillake: You Are Not Your Work

From 99U:

At the heart of any creative endeavor often lies fear; fear of missing an opportunity, of burning out, of not scaling, or fear of failure. In this presentation, Mindfulness Everywhere Director Gunatillake reminds us of the humanity in an often cold business world—and how to never lose sight of the fact that there is another human being at the other end of the screen.

Scientists Can Now Predict Intelligence From Brain Activity

Chelsea Leu in Wired: 

But now that neuroscientists have used maps of people’s brains to accurately predict intelligence, reality creeps ever so much closer to fiction.

By intelligence, in this case, the scientists mean abstract reasoning ability, which they inferred by mapping and analyzing the connections within people’s brains. But the study, published today in "Nature Neuroscience", is compelling because it gets at a fundamental and very uncomfortable truth: Some brains are better than others at certain things, simply because of the way they’re wired. And now, scientists are closer to being able to determine precisely which brains those are, and how they got that way.

Does Watching Good TV Make You a Better Person?

Melissa Dahl in The Science of Us, reports on a study that complements a previous one that asserted that reading novels also made you more empathetic: 

If you ever feel vaguely guilty about the vast amounts of television you watch, might I suggest you cling to the findings of this study, published last week in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. In it, the authors claim that watching high-quality television dramas — things like Mad Men or The West Wing — can increase your emotional intelligence. That is, watching good TV makes you more empathetic.

Thinking About The Future Of The Internet

On the Wall Street Journal David Gelernter and  Eric Freeman discuss the evolution of how we consume the internet: 

We go to the Internet for many reasons, but most often to discover what’s new. We have had libraries for millennia, but never before have we had a crystal ball that can tell us what is happening everywhere right now. Nor have we ever had screens, from room-sized to wrist-sized, that can show us high-resolution, constantly flowing streams of information. 

Today, time-based structures, flowing data—in streams, feeds, blogs—increasingly dominate the Web. Flow has become the basic organizing principle of the cybersphere. The trend is widely understood, but its implications aren’t.

There is also the other side of the equation, not just consumption but production. Anyone working producing content to distribute on the internet is aware of how rapid this flow really is. 

The Universality of the Word Huh

Melissa Dahl, Science of Us: 

Two apparent human truths: Everybody gets confused, and everybody expresses that confusion in a similar way. A team of Dutch researchers say that the word huh may be a universal one, appearing in near-identical sound and function in 31 vastly different languages. The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, just won an Ig Nobel Prize, a sort of parody of the Nobel Prize meant to honor science's weirder achievements.