In addition to the sciency stuff, I also stumbled across some articles on meta-science. My favourite: ‘putting the biology back into neurobiology’, or a plea to diversify neuroscience. Whether it helps I don’t know, the same arguments were already made in 1950 (!), when Frank Beach lamented the decrease in the number of species and types of behaviours studied in an article called ‘The snark was a boojum’(the title refers to a poem by Lewis Carroll). (I came across this article when watching a lecture by Hans Hofmann, which he gave at this year’s Neural Systems and Behavior course at the Marine Biology Laboratory – highly recommended!)

 Replications in psychology

Have you heard about the finding that depending on how you hold your lips when you watch a cartoon, you find it more funny (when your lips approximate the shape of a smile)? Well, it turns out that this is also one of the psychological findings that has come under scrutiny and some doubt its validity. To me, the ‘replication crisis’ comes back to dumb incentives that dominate science these days, which is highlighted by this quote (from the acticle linked to above): ‘The problem is, there isn’t much reward for being a skeptical psychologist.’

‘Science in the age of selfies’

I love the title – ‘Science in the age of selfies’. While this opinion piece has been criticised by some,

I still think it gives us some food for thought on the state of science, and maybe on the state of a society in the age of selfies.

How to think

To finish off, ‘How to think’ by/like Ed Boyden.