Read-Think-b4-u-Write

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explores what it means to be human by looking at what it means to be an android. The big tell for androids; they can't empathize with each other, with humans or animals. To determine an andy from a human, there is the elaborate Voight Kampff test that measures empathetic response to a series of questions. Each question should elicit some kind of sympathetic response. If no dilation of the pupil or blush response, then you are dealing with an android.Seems pretty straight forward and since it's science fiction, we know it works (at least in the novel). As humans empathy cues us to feed a crying child while an anguished look tells us to help out a pained friend and requires communication -- we can read both smiles (pleasure) and suffering (pain). It's more than just putting yourself in another's shoes, it's caring about what happens to the person in your sneakers. At the University of Virginia, James Coan...

Reading Twilight , Harry Potter (take that Harold Bloom), Hunger Games , and Watchmen , for that matter, will improve your brain. Don't believe me? Let's ask the experts. ABC News is reporting that scientists are using some of their most sophisticated tools to peer inside the human brain to see what happens when we engage in the process of reading, and they are finding a number of surprises: -- Reading is a very complex task that requires several different regions of the brain to work together. -- But surprisingly, we don't use the same neural circuits to read as we grow from infants to adults. So our brains are constantly changing throughout our lives. -- It appears possible that reading can improve the "connectivity" between the various brain circuits that are essential to understanding the written word. -- And there is recent evidence that simply reading a good novel can keep that enhanced "conne...