Weekend Reading

Writing worth reading - 2nd/3rd December 2023

• Why Walking Helps Us Think by Ferris Jabr

  • “What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them…”

• Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean by Andrew Lawler

  • “The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. "The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don't have seafarers until the early Bronze Age," adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. "Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It's a pretty stunning change…”

• How do elite groups form by Cremieux Recueil

  • “The commandos ran into the terminal yelling, “Stay down! We are Israeli soldiers!” in both Hebrew and English. Two Israeli hostages stood up and, because they’d been told to stay down, were mistaken for hijackers and were shot by the commandos. Another hostage got caught in the crossfire after the hijackers opened fire on the Israeli commandos.…”