From the WSJ: “Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London and told her mentor, Chris Frith, that she’d just seen a movie called “The Knowledge” about a group of would-be London cabdrivers, and that it had given her an idea for a scientific study. Frith told her to go for it. Maguire, who had cancer and died Jan. 4 at age 54, specialized in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory. In a series of studies, she demonstrated that human memories aren’t movies that we replay in our minds the way we watch movies on TV. Rather, they are imperfect scenes that we construct in our minds. When we’re thinking about where we want to go, our brains construct scenes that show us how to get there.”
The game of Ultimate Frisbee is helping to heal some of the wounds in the Middle East
From Reason: “Starting an Ultimate Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it’s a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in the 1960s and popularized by hippies, the sport is now the basis of a European relief effort. Beyond those aid organizations, European players have run grassroots fundraising efforts to get the Iraqi Ultimate league off the ground.”
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