Did anyone else find "The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers" to be a really weird framing for the #nytimes piece on the Gino/Data Colada affair, since the Data Colada bloggers are also very distinguished academics who are also professors at highly prestigious institutions?
Endel Tulving's passing makes me reflect on how much our clinical practice has been shaped by discoveries from cognitive neuroscience. Tulving's distinction between semantic and episodic memory is one I use often with patients and families (not using that jargon, of course). That these different faculties that we group together as "memory" are actually dissociable helps us to explain phenomena that can be puzzling or even exasperating. ("How come he can remember how to disassemble a car engine but can't remember what I ask him to get at the store?") Diagnostically, of course, we use the distinction to separate cases of Alzheimer's disease from another fascinating disorder, semantic dementia, in which episodic memory is relatively preserved but people lose semantic knowledge about the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/science/endel-tulving-dead.html
@d4d25d16 The amazing and troubling thing about this piece is how it links a single person's strange, pathological psychological makeup to structures that we now all live in and are largely resigned to (indeed, that many perceive as normal).
Fascinating read! Thomas Nagel on a new bio of J.L. Austin and his previously-unknown career as a WWII intelligence officer responsible for D-Day preparation, plus possible influences on his scholarly career and Oxford ordinary language philosophy https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n17/thomas-nagel/leader-of-the-martians
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Endel Tulving's passing makes me reflect on how much our clinical practice has been shaped by discoveries from cognitive neuroscience. Tulving's distinction between semantic and episodic memory is one I use often with patients and families (not using that jargon, of course). That these different faculties that we group together as "memory" are actually dissociable helps us to explain phenomena that can be puzzling or even exasperating. ("How come he can remember how to disassemble a car engine but can't remember what I ask him to get at the store?") Diagnostically, of course, we use the distinction to separate cases of Alzheimer's disease from another fascinating disorder, semantic dementia, in which episodic memory is relatively preserved but people lose semantic knowledge about the world. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/science/endel-tulving-dead.html