Word: thought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What they found was that while the overall size of Einstein's brain was about average, a region called the inferior parietal lobe was about 15% wider than normal. "Visuospatial cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement," write Witelson and her co-authors, "are strongly dependent on this region." And as it happens, Einstein's impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, then translated into the language of mathematics (the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musings on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam...
Faced with the unpleasant choice between acquiescing to ethnic cleansing and paying in American blood to stop it, Bill Clinton characteristically chose "neither"--and characteristically seems to have lucked out. No doubt this is annoying to political opponents and unfriendly commentators who thought they had him in a checkmate. In their annoyance, the critics should at least keep in mind that their country lucked...
Puzzling? I thought so until I learned about the remarkable institution called Odyssey of the Mind. OM, as it's known, gives kids from kindergarten through college a chance to practice teamwork while exercising the mental muscles responsible for creativity. Founded in 1978 by two New Jersey educators who felt that imaginative problem solving was getting short shrift in schools, OM has grown to include teams from all 50 states and 41 other countries; about half a million kids now participate worldwide, competing in regional, state and national contests that culminate in the World Finals each spring...
...summer, and that means clothes in summer colors. We thought we knew what those colors were--until we checked with a few of the major summer catalogs. Herewith an only slightly oversimplified glossary...
...consulting vast databases of past games and plotting computer-assisted strategies, a practice as common in chess now as using calculators to do long division. What's new here is the vast scale. In the long run, Kasparov vs. the World may tell us more about chess and human thought processes than Deep Blue ever could. "The result is irrelevant," says Kasparov, himself a part-time computer scientist and Internet addict. "It's a big experiment...