Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Periodicals | 30 September 2008
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Macbeth extolled “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,” in Shakespeare’s great tragic play of the same name. Soothing rest is not all that shut-eye provides, however. As sleep and cognition researchers Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen explain in their feature article in this issue, the brain is very busy during a night’s slumber. It is processing and sorting all the things we learned during the day, making valuable memories more resilient and tossing away irrelevant details. It finds hidden relations among our recollections and works to solve problems that arose during our waking hours. Turn to page 22 for our cover story, “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work.”
There is nothing like a good yarn to pluck our emotional strings, as Jeremy Hsu writes in “The Secrets of Storytelling,” beginning on page 46. Stories are one of humanity’s universals—they appear in all cultures—and certain themes arise repeatedly in tales around the world. Why do these narratives have such power over our feelings? The study of stories reveals clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy. Indeed, as you will learn from Hsu’s article, the stories we tell explain much about ourselves.
The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe is actually transcribed from Stephen Hawking's Lectures, the slim volume may not present a single theory unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces, but it does carefully explain the state of late 20th-century physics with the great scientist's characteristic humility and charm.
This idea-rich, relentlessly upbeat manual proffers graphic images as an aid to unlock creative thinking or clarify emotions. Drawing loosely on brain research, learning theory and information science, English business consultant Tony Buzan (Use Both Sides of Your Brain) and his brother Barry, a professor of international studies, first outline "radiant thinking," a method designed to enhance one's associative, nonlinear thought processes. Next they explain how to create "mind maps"-colorful, structured, drawings, cartoonish or complex-as a tool to overcome mental blocks, organize ideas, brainstorm