A recent New York Times op-ed by Joanne Lipman poses the question: “Is music the key to success?” As a serious amateur musician, I have long credited my half-way respectable pianistic accomplishments to the discipline I gained practicing Chopin etudes, and even to the teamwork I developed practicing Beethoven piano trios. In fact, I frequently pull out these arguments when trying to convince my children to practice piano, although once you have to make a “piano practicing makes you more successful” argument with your children, you know you’ve lost the piano playing battle.
Tired of my own anecdotal arguments, I eagerly read Lipman’s op-ed to find out what scientific evidence would say about the topic. Instead I was greeted with a whole series of anecdotes. Lipman writes: “Look carefully and you will find musicians at the top of almost any industry.” Then she lists illustrative examples: Woody Allen in the movie industry, Paula Zahn in news casting, Larry Page at Google.
Pretty strong evidence, yes? Not really, when you realize the huge number of successful people in all those industries who don’t have serious musical training… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
Are You Smarter than a Radiologist?
Notice anything unusual about this CT scan?
On the upper right side is an image of a gorilla. According to a new study, 83% of radiologists missed this image.
They had been looking through a series of scans, looking for “pulmonary nodules”—growths in the lung, in other words. The early scans included such nodes, and the radiologists were expert at finding them. This picture, in fact, includes a node near the lower left margin of the lung. That little white circle. But because they had nodes on their mind, the radiologists were not thinking about finding other types of images. They especially weren’t thinking about finding gorillas!
The moral of this story: When we look at the world, we often see what we are looking to see. Our attention is limited. So when we look for “nodes”, we might miss other even glaring parts of our field of vision.
Even physicians are prey to invisible gorillas!
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Daycare Versus Obamacare
According to a new study, daycare will increase your child’s health, intelligence and social development. But do you think the study is scientifically rigorous enough to justify this conclusion?…(Read the rest and view comments at Scientocracy)