Dr. James Catterall, professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education, says that his academic career has taken him down three main paths over the last few decades. The first was the examination of the economics of education, a pursuit that extended naturally from his undergraduate background in economics and from his graduate work at Stanford…
I first met Robert Sapolsky years ago at a research conference. My first impression was that he was quiet… too quiet. In a crowded hotel lobby with hundreds of scientists busily jabbering about themselves and their research, he seemed almost transparent. He didn’t talk much, took up very little personal space and seemed comfortable and…
Centuries of Craving Caffeine, particularly in the form of tea and coffee, has enjoyed a long history of adoration and exaltation the world over, dating back nearly 5000 years to ancient China. When coffee was introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century, its powers of wakefulness were immediately recognized as a fortuitous boon, coming, as…
Dr. William Newsome is sitting at his PC computer grumbling. “Do you know what IBM stands for?” Newsome asks in a slight Southern drawl. “It stands for ‘I’m Building a Mac’,” he quips, displaying quick-witted charm and ardent loyalty to the Macintosh operating system. Dr. Newsome, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, is…
In 1983, Howard Gardner rocked the education and social science communities with publication of a theory of multiple intelligences in his book, Frames of Mind. Gardner argued that in addition to defining intelligence in terms of a child or adult’s ability to solve problems and use language, other capacities and abilities such as musical, spatial,…
One of the world’s leading experts in the neurobiology of emotion, Dr. LeDoux has garnered many accolades for his basic research into how the brain processes fear. Using clever conditioning experiments, he and his colleagues have been able to show that a small almond sized brain structure called the amygdala is responsible for processing fear…