Neuroscience

Neuroscience runs as a thread across Kyle’s corpus in two distinct registers. The frontier-technology register comes through Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer-interface company, which this page is tagged from via a saved Vox piece on Musk’s and Facebook’s brain-/mind-reading ambitions and the attendant neuroethics — the question of where reading neural signals shades into reading thoughts. The learning-and-pedagogy register comes through The Science of Learning, TIME’s special edition, whose load-bearing claim is neuroplasticity: “Science has already dispensed with the notion that the adult brain is more or less fixed… that its neurons can’t grow and their connections can’t stay nimble. They can.” That source builds its whole argument — motivation, sustained attention, the debunking of the 10,000-hour myth — on the brain’s capacity to grow and re-wire well into adulthood.

Context: Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system and the brain, spanning molecular and cellular mechanisms, neural circuits, cognition, and behavior. “Neuroplasticity” — the brain’s ability to reorganize its connections in response to experience — and brain-computer interfaces are two of its higher-profile contemporary frontiers, both of which appear in Kyle’s notes.

Where this appears

• Neuralink — the BCI company; this page is tagged from a saved Vox piece on Musk/Facebook brain-reading and neuroethics.
• The Science of Learning — TIME’s neuroplasticity argument that the adult brain can grow and re-wire is the backbone of its account of how learning works.