In 2001 Marc Pensky proposed the intriguing notion that our culture is now composed of digital natives and digital immigrants. He’s now expanded the concept to include digital wisdom (Pensky, 2009). Let’s explore the updated concept and its increasing cultural significance. Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants We’re a social species with a long juvenile development, [...]

I’m not sure why we tend to pay more attention to 100 of something than to 99 or 101, but we do. This is my 100th Brain Connection column, going back to the first issue, posted right after The Millennium in February 2000. My assignment was to develop non-technical explanations of educationally significant new developments [...]

Our brain’s organization biases it towards preferences and decisions that enhance our survival and the quality of our life. These biases are evident during the current presidential campaign, and five underlying brain properties seem especially significant. A Social Species Humans are a social species and this gives us an important advantage over species in which [...]

The principal reason that animals have a brain and plants don’t is because we can move of our own volition. Plants can’t, and so they don’t even need to know where they are. What’s the point of knowing that other plants are better situated if you can’t join them-or that a logger is approaching if [...]

I was recently looking for something in my bookshelves, and came across my battered copy of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. A thought popped up in my mind, so I turned to the copyright date, and realized that it’s the 25th anniversary of the publication of a book that’s sparked [...]