Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.

I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.

The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.

One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

If you believe you're a good driver or a lousy dancer, think again.

Most of us believe we can accurately gauge how our personal performance and abilities stack up against our peers, but new research suggests that we are in fact poor judges of our own comparative talents.

Researchers from the University of Michigan Business School, Duke University and the University of Chicago report that people at all skill levels, including both top achievers and poor performers, show similar degrees of inaccuracy and bias in making interpersonal comparisons.

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity presents a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cross cultural setting. The scoring is based not upon the content or the subject material, but instead on the mathematical complexity of hierarchical organization of information. The subject’s performance on a task of a given complexity represents the stage of developmental complexity.

The 9/11 commission has drawn more attention for the testimony it has gathered than for the purpose it has set for itself. Today the commission will hear from Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, and her account of the administration's policies before Sept. 11 is likely to differ from that of Richard Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, in most particulars except one: it will be disputed.

There is more than politics at work here, although politics explains a lot. The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is "to provide a 'full and complete accounting' of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future."

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the "black swan."

People sometimes solve problems with a unique process called insight, accompanied by an “Aha!” experience. It has long been unclear whether different cognitive and neural processes lead to insight versus noninsight solutions, or if solutions differ only in subsequent subjective feeling. Recent behavioral studies indicate distinct patterns of performance and suggest differential hemispheric involvement for insight and noninsight solutions. Subjects solved verbal problems, and after each correct solution indicated whether they solved with or without insight. We observed two objective neural correlates of insight. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (Experiment 1) revealed increased activity in the right hemisphere anterior superior temporal gyrus for insight relative to noninsight solutions. The same region was active during initial solving efforts. Scalp electroencephalogram recordings (Experiment 2) revealed a sudden burst of high-frequency (gamma-band) neural activity in the same area beginning 0.3 s prior to insight solutions. This right anterior temporal area is associated with making connections across distantly related information during comprehension. Although all problem solving relies on a largely shared cortical network, the sudden flash of insight occurs when solvers engage distinct neural and cognitive processes that allow them to see connections that previously eluded them.

The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument which is only convincing if precise loses all its force if the assumptions upon which it is based are slightly changed, while an argument which is convincing though imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying axioms.
— Jacob Schwartz

In the fields of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur

Not all those who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
- Alan Watts

Neuroscientists have given up looking for the seat of the soul, but they are still seeking what may be special about human brains, what it is that provides the basis for a level of self-awareness and complex emotions unlike those of other animals.

Most recently they have been investigating circuitry rather than specific locations, looking at pathways and connections that are central in creating social emotions, a moral sense, even the feeling of free will.

There are specialized neurons at work, as well — large, cigar-shaped cells called spindle cells.

"But it is vital to remember that information – in the sense of raw data – is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."
- Arthur C. Clarke

The most brilliant decisions tend to come from the gut. While that observation is not new, it is now backed by a growing body of research from economics, neurology, cognitive psychology, and other fields. What the science suggests is that intuition -- or instinct, or hunch, or "learning without awareness," or whatever you want to call it -- is a real form of knowledge. It may be nonrational, ineffable, and not always easy to get in touch with, but it can process more information on a more sophisticated level than most of us ever dreamed. Psychologists now say that far from being the opposite of effective decision-making, intuition is inseparable from it. Without it we couldn't decide anything at all.

Victorian Englishmen were not known for feeling comfortable displaying their emotions. Charles Darwin, exceptional in so many other ways, was like his countrymen in this regard, and considered the display of emotions in adult humans to be vestigial, something left over from our evolutionary past. That didn't stop him from publishing, in 1872, what remains the most comprehensive text on the nature of emotions.

DOD official endorses approach, but expert warns of information overload

Giving military commanders timely access to information is only half the battle, a Marine Corps leader recently said. Delivering it in an intuitive fashion so that the commanders can make quick decisions is the next challenge.

Military systems tend to generate data in static checklist form, said Brig. Gen. Jerry McAbee, deputy commander of the Marine Corps' Marine Forces Pacific. But "the checklist approach to decision-making is not what we need for the 21st century," he said. Military leaders need a networked knowledge system that draws information from databases worldwide.

This system should present them with the best — even if incomplete — set of facts in a conflict situation, from which they can make an intuitive decision on how to act, McAbee said, adding that commanders' use of intuition in battle is what puts "war in the realm of art rather than science."