# data[].attributes.body
1. Write 4 true/false statements (sentences) about the contents of the chapter. Make sure the statements are easy to understand and are about ideas that are central in the chapter.

2. Prepare your answers with a clear justification (refer to experiments, if possible).

# data[].attributes.body
Answer the following questions:

1. Why do people have such passion about issues they know so little about?
2. In the case of moral reasoning, can you shatter the knowledge illusion?
3. What do you think are the implications of what we learn in this chapter?

# data[].attributes.body
Read the chapter and comment on at least 2 of the following excerpts.

In your commentary, first mention what the authors of the book say and then include your view. Write it down and bring it to class.

1. "The concern is that the existence of successful artificial intelligence (AI) will feed  on itself."j p. 132.

2. "Confusing how much you know and how much the Internet knows does make sense in a perverse way." p. 137

3. A GPS cannot yet read your intentions.

4. "Crowdsourcing is actually a primitive method of employing the community of knowledge compared to whats' on the horizon." p. 149

5. "We'll be lost." p. 152

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Steven Sloman received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1990 and completed his post-doctoral research at University of Michigan. He began teaching at Brown in 1992. Steven is a cognitive scientist who studies how people think. He has studied how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how the different systems that constitute thought interact to produce conclusions, conflict, and conversation, and how our construal of how the world works influences how we evaluate events and decide what actions to take. The focus of his current research is collective cognition, how we think as a community, a topic elaborated on in his book with Phil Fernbach The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. His work has been discussed in the New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, the Financial Times, the Economist, Scientific American, National Geographic, and more. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Cognition: The International Journal of Cognitive Science and currently on the Editorial Board of Decision and Psychological Science. Find out more about Sloman's work here.

Monday 2-3pm & Thursday 3-4pm or by appointment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Steven Sloman received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1990 and completed his post-doctoral research at University of Michigan. He began teaching at Brown in 1992. Steven is a cognitive scientist who studies how people think.

# data[].attributes.body
2. Select a paragraph from the conclusion and bring it to class. Why did you choose this paragraph?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Brief History of Nudge ㅡ Learn the power of nudge to win at behavioral change

# data[].attributes.headline
Lessons on how to make smarter decisions

# data[].attributes.subject
Lessons on how to make smarter decisions

# data[].attributes.body
1. Read pages 250-253. Can you think of any decisions you have had to make in which you applied or could apply one of the lessons? Which one?
2. Watch the video Nudge (Richard Thaler) and write down 2 facts that you found interesting and say why.

# data[].attributes.body
Select 5 words, images, or concepts from the chapter and connect them. Bring the words, images or concepts to class. You will ask your classmates to connect them and you will answer if their connections make sense or not. You can do it in PAIRS.

# data[].attributes.headline
Write one question for your classmates. The question needs to be based on the chapter you have been assigned. Think of a question that will make us THINK about the contents of the book. Prepare the answer.

# data[].attributes.subject
Write one question for your classmates. The question needs to be based on the chapter you have been assigned. Think of a question that will make us THINK about the contents of the book. Prepare the answer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
#Ourtime: Archer varsity soccer team 'work[s] together,' wins first league game

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With their motto for the year, #ourtime, in mind, the varsity soccer team headed to Marine Park in Santa Monica to play Pacifica Christian High School on Tuesday, Dec. 11. The team won the game with a final score of 3-0. Sophomore Sydney Banks has been on the upper school varsity team since ninth grade,...

# data[].attributes.body
1. Relate the images (team, brains, bees, and castle) and the conference (Tomasello, start at minute 6:39) below to the contents of the chapter and particularly the section on "braininess". What is the connection? Write a paragraph and bring it to class.

2. What are the benefits and the DANGERS of collaboration according to the chapter? Relate them to experiments mentioned in the chapter. What do you think about it?

# data[].attributes.body
Start watching at minute 6:39

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Michael Tomasello - Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

# data[].attributes.body
Select 2 experiments from this chapter and do them with your friends or classmates (you can do it in pairs). After that, answer the following questions:

1. What 2 experiments did you do? Describe them.

2. What were the results? Were they in agreement with the results mentioned in the book?

3. What conclusions can you reach from the results in the two experiments that are related to the main ideas of the chapter?

# data[].attributes.body
7. What is the illusion of explanatory depth?

How much do we know?
8. Give some examples of the complexity of our world.

The allure of illusion
9. What is the “illusion of understanding”?
10. Was reading these two chapters difficult? Why? Did you find the information and the arguments interesting? What was the thing that you found most interesting?

# data[].attributes.body
1. Why do the authors claim that hyperthymesia is not a great power?

What good is a brain?
2. What is the most fundamental difference between plants and animals?

The discerning brain
3. How do humans recognize faces in different situations? Do we take a picture of the people's faces and retrieve them or do we store abstract information about their faces? How does this relate to abstract information?

4. Identify 5 NEW words you want to remember and write a sentence with each of them.

Fune’s curse
(no specific question)

# data[].attributes.body
Introduction
1. The introduction to the book begins with some historical facts about the Castle Bravo nuclear testing program. Look for some information about the accident. What does the story about these facts illustrate according to the authors of the book
Thinking as collective action

2. Is the human mind like a computer? What do bees have to do with this question?

Ignorance and illusion
3. How are toilets related to an “illusion of understanding”?

What thinking is for
4. What is thinking for?
5. Why do individuals have so little knowledge about how the world Works (e.g., toilets)?

The community of knowledge
6. All our knowledge is inside our heads. True or false? Why?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
You Don't Know How Toilets Work - The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
All along the shoreline, for as far as you can see, slick shells of horseshoe crabs glisten in the fading daylight. Listen closely, and you can hear their subtle clacking and the whisper of water over their carapaces.

It's horseshoe crab spawning season in Delaware Bay, on America's Atlantic coast. Every May and June, on nights when the moon is new and the tide is high, they crawl onto the beach to mate and bury their eggs.

The ritual goes back 445 million years. Horseshoe crabs are living fossils that have survived four mass extinctions. They are bizarre creatures with 10 eyes that offer insights into how vision evolved. And their blood has saved countless human lives - including yours.

But these creatures, nature's consummate survivors, are in peril. And to protect them, it's urgent that biologists understand their life cycles and learn how many there are. That's why researchers are out in force this night, working quickly to take a census of the crabs before they disappear beneath the waves.

READ MORE:
* Rare video of crayfish spawning
* Giant flying turkeys once roamed Australia
* Millions of years ago, we would have had penis bones
* Did mammoths live with humans?

Elle Gilchrist reaches into a pile of crabs. Each is glossy green-brown and shaped like a shallow combat helmet with a 15cm spine sticking out the back.

Gilchrist, a 20-year-old intern with the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, who sports a long blond ponytail, galoshes and silver horseshoe-crab-shaped earrings, expertly flips a crab over to reveal 10 segmented legs and a sheaf of sturdy gills. The males' limbs end in pincers, which they use to grab onto prospective mates. The insides of the females' carapaces are lined with thousands of tiny pale green eggs - the reason for tonight's festivities.

Gilchrist starts to tally the horseshoes in her plot. "One, two, three, four, five males," she calls to a volunteer taking notes. Then she thrusts her hand among the mass of shells and feels for the huge, smooth carapace of the lady they're all trying to woo. "One female." She grins.

Some people might be squeamish at the sight of hundreds of many-legged creatures congregating for what amounts to a giant arthropod orgy. But not Gilchrist. She describes the animals as "precious" and the mating ritual as "awe-inspiring."

Horseshoe people are prone to gushing. Maggie Pletta, DNERR's education coordinator, likes to shock volunteers by literally kissing a crab, pressing her face against the mouth hidden amid its many legs. Stew Michels, a scientist with Delaware's Division of Fish and Wildlife, goes into raptures over the annual spawning: "I don't know, man ... It's just tremendous."

Conservation ecologist John Tanacredi, director of the Centre for Environmental Research and Coastal Oceans Monitoring at Molloy College in New York, is so enamoured he wants the United Nations to create a new UNESCO designation for them: "World Heritage Species."

"These animals walked below the legs of brontosaurus at some point in time," Tanacredi says. "They really should be the paradigm for survival and sustainability."

Horseshoes crabs are not actually crabs. They're instead distantly related to spiders and scorpions (though they predate both).

They've developed some pretty savvy evolutionary strategies, like sex on the beach. When horseshoes first evolved, land animals didn't exist yet, which meant no predators could get at eggs laid in the sand. At the end of spawning season, adult crabs could return to the water feeling relatively secure that their DNA would live on.

And so it has. Epochs came and went, oceans rose and fell, the continents converged and drifted apart again, and the horseshoe crabs endured. They outlasted their marine cousins the trilobites. They witnessed the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. They persevered through four mass extinctions, including one that wiped out 90 percent of all life on Earth.

"These guys are maybe, debatably, the best-adapted creatures in the world," Gilchrist says. "The panda? Don't know how the panda made it. But the horseshoe crab? I'm like, wow, that really has it figured out."

First of all, there's their blood. The stuff that runs in horseshoe crabs' veins is copper-based, and it gleams pale blue when exposed to oxygen. (Iron makes humans' blood look red.) But the true marvel of horseshoe blood lies with specialised immune cells called amebocytes, which clump up and form a gel on contact with a bacterial invader.

An extract from these cells, limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), has been used to test for contamination in every vaccine, surgical tool and medical device that's been inside a human body in the past 47 years, saving untold numbers from dying of infections like pneumonia and E. coli. No other animal's blood has such powerful antimicrobial properties, and scientists still aren't able to reproduce it in a lab.

A vampiric biomedical industry has sprung up to harvest horseshoe blood. Crabbers catch the animals and send them to labs, where about 30 per cent of their blood is drawn. The amebocytes are then turned into LAL - US$50 million of it every year. And the crabs are dropped back into the ocean, preferably in the same water where they were found.

Horseshoe crabs' eyes are a study in how one of life's most complex organs evolved. There are 10 of them, including two that can detect ultraviolet light from the moon and stars. These specialised peepers let the crabs know when it's the new and full moons - the times when the tide is highest and conditions are right for spawning. Other pairs help the crabs find mates and see through the sea floor murk. Even the spear-like tail has an eye, which keeps the brain synchronised with the daily cycles of light and darkness.

The list of weird and amazing attributes goes on: Their shells repel bacteria. The jagged spines along their sides help the crabs feel their way along the sea floor and contain nerve cells sensitive to minute changes in the water temperature and current. A horseshoe crab chews its food with its legs, then stuffs the food into its mouth, which is situated in the middle of its belly. Their shells are hinged; when a crab finds itself upside down, it will bend at the middle and use its tail to push against the sand and flip itself upright. They can live to be 25 - far longer than most dogs and cats. And their eggs are essential food for migrating shorebirds, including the endangered red knot, which flies north at the same time the horseshoes are spawning.

"All of this life, this productivity, is totally lined up and synchronised and linked together for as long as there is coastline," Tanacredi says. "And it has been for millions of years."

Yet, despite decades of study, horseshoes still hold mysteries. Scientists don't quite know what the crabs get up to in the years between birth and their first spawning season, at age 10. They molt so often (18 times in their first decade of life) they're difficult to tag and track, though scientists are beginning to study the creatures' microbes as a possible marker of where they've been. They're incredibly difficult to breed in captivity, perhaps in part because they seem to prefer to lay their eggs on sand from particular beaches. As for what they sense in the sand, no one knows. Scientists aren't even sure how many horseshoe crabs live in the ocean - estimates range from 4 million to about 12 million for the lone Atlantic species. Three more species live in the Pacific.

These unanswered questions have become all the more urgent in recent years, Tanacredi says. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature changed the status of Limulus polyphemus from "lower risk" to "vulnerable." The assessors noted that the overall Atlantic population had declined by at least 30 per cent in the past 40 years.

The causes for this decline are complex, but humans undoubtedly have a major role. There's the LAL industry, which bleeds a half a million horseshoes a year. The process doesn't kill the crabs, but some horseshoes do die accidentally. And after being abducted, bled and transported hundreds of miles, many more are disoriented and debilitated. The final mortality rate could be as high as 29 per cent, according to research published in 2015.

Still more crabs are harvested as bait for eel and conch fishing. Some, particularly in southeast Asia, are caught for human consumption. The shoreline habitat horseshoes depend on for spawning is being lost to development. And it's not known how much of an effect global climate change, and the accompanying ocean acidification and rising sea levels, may on have on the crabs.

Horseshoe crabs withstood a devastating asteroid strike that killed most other creatures on this planet. But will they survive us?

That's up to humans, Tanacredi says, especially ones like Gilchrist. When a storm rolls in about half an hour into the survey, Gilchrist simply pulls up the hood of her jacket and keeps trudging down the beach in the driving rain.

"Eleven males, two females," she shouts over the din. The two volunteers who are working with her, a mother and daughter, look slightly daunted by the weather but neither complains. Gilchrist tries to keep them motivated: "Whoo, gotta love fieldwork!" she says with a laugh.

In a matter of days, the moon will change phase and the horseshoes will vanish beneath the waves for another year. With so few nights left for surveying, it's worth staying out in such uncomfortable conditions, Gilchrist says. Every crab counts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This creature has 10 eyes, legs that chew and blood that saved your life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All along the shoreline, for as far as you can see, slick shells of horseshoe crabs glisten in the fading daylight. Listen closely, and you can hear their subtle clacking and the whisper of water over their carapaces. It's horseshoe crab spawning season in Delaware Bay, on America's Atlantic coast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The woman that never forgets - Jill Price First Intereview!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This talk describes brain imaging research conducted over the last 15 years that has discovered a number of regions of the human brain, each of which conducts a remarkably specific mental function, from perceiving visual motion, to understanding language, to thinking about what other people are thinking.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nancy's TED talk: A neural portrait of the human mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This talk describes brain imaging research conducted over the last 15 years that has discovered a number of regions of the human brain, each of which conducts a remarkably specific mental function, from perceiving visual motion, to understanding language, to thinking about what other people are thinking.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2HFzAYRwSM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0YKlsScno

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter 3. How we think

Human reasoning is causal
4. What is causal reasoning? What are some examples?
5. Are people good at causal reasoning?

Stop at “Reasoning forward and backward”
6. Write two facts or ideas that you want to remember from Chapters 2 and 3.

# data[].attributes.body
Write one true-false statement for each section and bring it to class for your classmates so that you can test them. Have the anwers ready.

1. Thinking with our bodies and the world, p. 85-90

2. Embodied intelligence

3. How humans are designed

4. The world is your computer

5. The brain is in the mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How do birds manage to fly through narrow spaces without constantly bumping into trees or buildings? It turns out that they use a trick of the eye called optic flow. Understanding what optic flow is and how birds use it could help us build a safer world for our feathered friends.

Aired: 04/07/14

Rating: NR

The full episode is no longer available for online streaming. Why?

Please continue to enjoy extra(s) from this episode. The full episode is still available for purchase through the "Buy Now" links.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Mysteries of Optic Flow | Season 41 Episode 9 | NOVA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How do birds manage to fly through narrow spaces without constantly bumping into trees or buildings? It turns out that they use a trick of the eye called optic flow. Understanding what optic flow is and how birds use it could help us build a safer world for our feathered friends.