This is the last post of the year on this blog. This makes it a good moment to look back and share a bit of behind-the-scenes thinking. You may have noticed something about this site. No, the layout did not change, but I did make a deliberate shift in content. I noticed that both this… Read More This Blog, AI, and a Year of Writing More Carefully
Today, social media have a fairly bad reputation. On Twitter (I persist), people speak of Bluecry instead of Bluesky. On Bluesky, everyone on Twitter is suspected of being right-wing. And Facebook? Who is even still there? LinkedIn, finally, self-promotion, surely? That intuition is understandable. Anyone who scrolls through the comment sections under news articles, where… Read More Why Social Media Make Us More Cynical Than Necessary
I do not have a crystal ball. However, based on what I learned last week, 2026 could well become the year of the Brain Economy. When major players such as the OECD, UNESCO, the World Economic Forum and McKinsey begin to embrace an idea. The chances are real. So what exactly is the Brain Economy?… Read More Why the Brain Economy Could Become the Next Big Policy Idea
Last Friday, I was in Paris for what was, without exaggeration, one of the best lectures I have seen in recent years. Barbara Oakley was on stage, doing what she does better than almost anyone else: making complex insights from cognitive science and neuroscience clear, without flattening them. She touched on the importance of knowledge… Read More Why Knowledge Matters More in the Age of AI
When a new analysis of PISA data on growth mindset appears, the temptation to draw quick conclusions about what schools “should do” is never far away. That temptation only grows when the dataset looks impressive. The PISA 2022 study, for example, covers 74 countries and includes more than half a million students. A recent PLOS… Read More Growth Mindset, PISA and the Limits of Correlation
I recently started reading Dan Brown’s latest novel. As always, he skilfully blends science, mystery and big words about consciousness into something that reads as if this might just be true. One of those words is noetic: the idea that consciousness is more than mere brain activity, and perhaps even a force in its own… Read More Consciousness Is Not a Secret Society (Dan Brown Is Entertaining. Consciousness Research Is More Interesting.)
As we move towards the end of 2025, the pattern has become hard to ignore. Over the past twelve months, the same sequence has played out again and again. Concerns rise about young people’s mental health. Attention quickly turns to social media. And before long, a policy proposal appears that promises clarity and decisiveness: an… Read More The (Overly) Simple Story About Youth Mental Health
If you see the turtle, you are right-brained. If you see the camel, you are left-brained (to be clear: no, you’re not) Found this gem here. Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
Anyone who has ever sat in an online meeting with an email open on the side, a document that needed to be checked “quickly”, and perhaps a chat message popping up, will recognise the feeling. You are busy, but at the end of the meeting, you mainly feel tired. A new study by Frontzkowski and… Read More Why Multitasking During Video Meetings Leads to Fatigue and Worse Performance
Anyone using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude today relies, indirectly, on an idea from 2017. Barbara Oakley reminded me of this today. That idea appears in a paper with a strikingly confident title: Attention Is All You Need. In hindsight, the title was not bravado but an accurate summary of what followed. Oakley also noted that… Read More How a Relatively Small Paper Laid the Foundation for ChatGPT and Gemini