Alexandra Carmichael

December 11, 2011

Here’s another compelling compilation of what we’re reading at QS Labs:

• Minding Your Mitochondria by Dr. Terry Wahls (TED talk): Astounding talk by a woman who used dietary self-experimentation to reverse her MS progression.
• A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior by Noam Chomsky: Chomsky dissects Skinner’s work, concluding that it is “largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is not the result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or the absence of a plausible alternative.”
• A Prospective Study of Diet Quality and Mental Health in Adolescents by Felice Jacka et. al. (PLoS): A study of 3,000 teenagers in Australia showing that diet quality directly impacts mental health, and not the other way around.
• To Sleep on the Subway, Maybe, but to Dream? Poor Chance by Christine Haughney (NYT): A little experiment to determine whether one could get useful sleep riding the NYC subway.
• Emotional Literacy: Intelligence With a Heart by Claude Steiner. This free ebook goes through 17 stages of emotional literacy, which seem transformative if incorporated into any kind of communication, relationship, or business.
• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming: This is a transcript of a talk from Paul Graham’s blog explaining how one goes about doing great research.
• Computer More Accurate Than Human Doctor at Breast Cancer Diagnosis (research out of Stanford): A new “computational pathologist” has been developed that trains itself on existing cancer samples and can “diagnose and prognose new cancer patients with better accuracy than a human doctor.”
• Hyposafe.com: a subdermal EEG that detects brain wave changes in response to low blood sugar.
• An Evolution Toward A Programmable World by Larry Smarr (NYT): One vision, perhaps too conservative, of how the world of sensors and computing power will look in a decade.
• Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy (Economist): Another vision of the future – will we really have 40% unemployment within a decade?
• Almost 100 free courses on the brain and cognitive sciences through MIT’s OpenCourseWare, from social psychology to human cognition.

Thanks to Ernesto Ramirez, Rajiv Mehta, Adam Dole, Daniel Reda, and Joel Dudley for contributing to this week’s list!