As long as 42,000 years ago, homo sapiens were making music—and not just chanting and beating on their chests. Millennia before Man-the-toolmaker figured out the principles of the wheel or the lever, he was carving finger holes in bird bones and hollowed-out pieces of mammoth ivory and blowing through them. Archaeologists have recovered some of these amazing artifacts in southern…
Recently I took my mother to see tap star Savion Glover at our local performing arts center. The hall was packed, mostly with children whose parents had brought them to see the legendary dancer. Predominant in the crowd were students from inner-city performing arts schools. During intermission my mother and I went to the concession stand, where candy was on…
Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, was named Piyush by his Indian immigrant parents and raised as a Hindu. His conversion to Christianity, he told an interviewer from Christianity Today, took seven years. It began when his grandfather died and he turned to books for insights into the mysteries of life and death—first the Bible, then the writings of…
Ever go to bed with the name of someone or something on the tip of your tongue? You just can’t quite remember it. Then you wake up the next morning, and bang! Mystery solved. This often happens to me after I watch an old movie on TCM, the Turner Classic Movies cable station. I’ll recognize an actor from the 1930s,…
It’s not often that you find the Grinch and neuroscience in the same sentence, but writer David DiSalvo finds a link in this seasonally apropos piece from Psychology Today. Check it out! Rose Caiola Inspired. Rewired.
It was with me at the beginning, almost before I was here myself. It will be there at the end, gently easing me closer to the secrets of the universe. It provides escape from daily stress. It makes all my problems disappear, at least for a little while. It helped me grow into what I am today. It is sleep.…
We tend to think of our internal organs as specialists, highly refined machines that work 24/7 at specific tasks. The one exception is the brain: the ultimate supercomputer that can make a multitude of decisions and manage our behavior with incredible speed and efficiency. Now research shows that the brain doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence. The heart and stomach,…
You want something—maybe it’s a car, a job, a dream vacation, the end of an illness, the start of a relationship, Whatever it is, you set your sights on it and then…as the Stones so eloquently said, “You can’t always get what you want.” But will you be satisfied to only get what you need? In a life where free…
Intelligence used to provide a vital survival advantage, making smart genes more likely to be passed on to the next generation. But that era is long gone, thanks to today’s computers and other devices that override various human weaknesses. Today, evolution in general would seem to be, well…out of date. But it turns out that cultural changes may be able…
