The rise of instant and objective feedback systems in education makes young people anxious to make mistakes, especially in language, because there’s no room for error with machines. William Davies posits that because the powers-that-be insist on pushing education to be more quantifiable, especially post-pandemic, children have no safe space to learn through errors. As they grow older, this makes them even more fearful of messing up because of the consequences that may arise from using the “wrong” words. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
