1 . It’s an attractive idea: by playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills (语言能力) and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate. “For every study that finds some evidence, there’s an equal number of papers that find no evidence,” says Bobby Stojanoski, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at Western University in Ontario.

Recently, in perhaps the biggest real-world study of these programs, Stojanoski and his team found 8,563 volunteers. First, participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months on average, though durations ranged from two weeks to more than five years. Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and verbal skills. They faced memory exercises, spatial reasoning tasks, pattern-finding puzzles and strategy challenges.

When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental edge over the other group in memory, verbal skills and reasoning. Even among those who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn’t boost thinking abilities above the level of people who didn’t use the programs.

“No matter how we sliced the data, we were unable to find any testimony that brain training was associated with cognitive abilities,” says Stojanoski. That held true whether the team analyzed participants by age, program used, education or socioeconomic status (地位)—all were cognitively similar to the group who didn’t use the programs.

“Brain training may be beneficial in specific situations, but real world may be the best brain trainer,” says Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois. While it’s possible to improve mental abilities, Stine-Morrow advocates practicing those skills in different real-life situations, “That’s a much better use of one’s time than sitting at a computer and doing little tasks.”

2 . Ever fought with a problem? Picked up a new skill? Encountered a difficult concept? The language of learning is full of references to parts of the body outside the brain. Perhaps that’s because these phrases suggest something deeper. Researchers are detecting that learning is easier, quicker and more long-lasting if it involves the body.

“In the past, people have argued that as we grow, we become more able to think abstractly (抽象地),” says Andrew Manches, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Conventional (传统的) thinking might suggest that teachers should help prevent children from using body gestures to prepare them for the adult world. But in truth, the physical world never really leaves our thinking. For example, when we process verbs such as lick, kick and pick, medical scanners show that the parts of our brain that control the muscles in our face, legs and hands, respectively, light up with activity.

Science is beginning to back up the idea that actions really might speak louder than words in the classroom. Spencer Kelly, a psychologist at Colgate University in New York, has found that people spend three times as much time gesturing when they think the message they get across is remarkably important, suggesting that even if only at the subconscious (潜意识的) level, we appreciate the communicative value of our body language. Kelly has also found evidence that a teacher is more appealing to students when he or she uses arm and hand movements to stress points.

Also, some studies indicate that young children obtain more if their teacher uses gestures when explaining a concept. Meanwhile, Sunsan Wagner Cook, a psychologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has found that children pick up new concepts more effectively, if they are taught to mirror and repeat gestures their teacher uses.

3 . The Financial Times app urged me to read the latest headlines. More disturbing, Google News installed itself and did the same thing. Most absurd of all, every single incoming email announced itself with a beep.

This was all simple enough to fix. Text messages and phone calls are now the only apps allowed to interrupt me. Still, it was annoying. I wondered: surely everyone switches off most notifications, right?

Perhaps not, I stumbled upon an essay by Guardian columnist Coco Khan marveling at how much calmer she felt after turning off notifications. She explained that WhatsApp alone had sent her over 100 notifications a day and that she had only silenced the apps because she’d been on holiday, and the phone was buzzing all night.

I read Khan’s account as a cautionary tale for all of us. Humans can adapt to a lot; it’s easy to sleepwalk into a state of chronic stress and distraction without ever reflecting that things could be different.

This seems common. One of the most important findings in behavioral science is that default(默认) settings have an outsize influence over our choices. App makers clearly believe we’ll put up with it, and they may be right.

One study, published in 2015 by researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, found that on average six out of seven smartphone apps were left in their default notification settings. Given how many notifications are valueless, this suggests that in the face of endless notifications, many smartphone users have learnt helplessness.

Of course we sometimes want to know immediately when something has happened. As I am fond of saying, a doorbell is more convenient than going to the door every 90 seconds to see if anyone is there. Although that trade-off would change if the doorbell itself were sounding every few minutes, day and night.

But most of us have too many notifications enabled. “ Notification” is a dishonest euphemism(委婉说法)，anyway. The correct word is “interruption”.

Oliver Burkeman puts it in his book Four Thousand Weeks: our attention is not just a scarce resource; it is life itself.“At the end of your life, looking back, whatever caught your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.“ Glance at yet another notification, and you are literally paying with your life.

4 . While most musicians work with other artists when creating their music, Holly Herndon, an American musician and sound artist who is now based in Berlin, takes a different way, working with the machine learning software called Spawn. The software uses artificial neural networks modeled after the structure of the human brain. These networks learn patterns from datasets during the training process. Based on the data, the networks create new material that includes Herndon’s own voice.

When producing her album, PROTO, Holly trained datasets to write new music. The process requires the input data of music written by people or by artificial intelligence (AI). The neural networks then produce variations of that music. “Computers surprise you in a way that an instrument doesn’t,” Holly said. So what does music sound like when composed by what is essentially a robot? It sounds like music from the future!

But Holly Herndon isn’t the only one exploring AI in composition. Machines have played an increasingly important role in music over the last century. The godfather of computer science, Alan Turing, developed the first computer generated music in 1951. Then in 1980. David Cope from the University of California, Santa Cruz developed EMI — Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a system that analyzes existing music and produces new pieces based on it.

AI might not take over the job of the “pop star” anytime soon, or will it? Miquela Sousa is a computer-generated artist with over one million followers on Instagram. “I’m a model and singer. And I’m a robot,” Miquela said. This then raises the question: Can we reproduce creativity using a computer?

Though those questions are not easy to answer, I believe the next frontier of music lies somewhere in between. I can see the path forward with a new dawn of creativity that combines human inventiveness with AI. And the next chapter of music will certainly become wonderful as music and AI become even more closely connected.

5 . It was a quiet early afternoon in the library, and we librarians were enjoying a chat at the library desk. Suddenly, a regular reader, who had been reading a magazine, marched up to us, gave us an annoyed “Shush (嘘)!” and went back to her seat.

Shocked into silence, we tried not to laugh. How strange for a group of librarians to be shushed by a reader! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Well, it seems hard to explain. If you’re a baby boomer (婴儿潮出生的人) like me, you probably remember libraries as places of adults’ silent reading. These days, however, libraries are more like busy community centers, where being noisy to some degree is the new normal, especially when kids are taking part.

I am a loud librarian. My voice is naturally on the louder side. The hundreds of programs I led as a children’s librarian were filled with singing, dancing, movement exercises and cheerful readings of books with crowds of children and their caregivers. No shushing allowed!

Growing knowledge about the importance of kids and teens learning through hands-on experiences has since caused a sea change in how public libraries connect with young readers. These types of programs like board games, poetry reading and story times certainly aren’t designed to be silent.

But it’s a balancing act. Not all readers—or librarians—like the idea of a noisy library. It’s clear to me now that on the day my colleagues and I were shushed by a reader, we should have been using our “library voices” as we talked. Still, it’s unlikely that libraries will ever return to the days when they were places of silence. There’s just too much fun and learning happening. I heartily agree with my friend Rachel Payne, an early-childhood service educator at the Brooklyn Public Library, who told me, “When I visit a library and it is quiet, I always feel a bit sad. A library where conversations are happening and tables are full is a very good thing!”

7 . Young dolphins, within the first few months of life, display their creativity by creating a unique sound. These bleats, chirps and squeaks amount to a novel possession in the animal kingdom — a label that conveys an identity, comparable to a human name.

These labels are called signature whistles(标志哨声), and they play an essential role in creating and keeping relationships among dolphins. While the development of a signature whistle is influenced by learning from other dolphins, each whistle still varies in volume, frequency, pitch(音高) and length.

The scientists found dolphins who live in regions with more seagrass have signature whistles that are higher in pitch and shorter in length when compared to those who live in areas where the seafloor is muddier. Meanwhile, dolphins in smaller groups have whistles that change pitch more often than dolphins in larger groups.

In 2013, researchers discovered that dolphins imitate another’s signature whistle to re-establish contact, at times adding parts of their signature whistle to the call. Moreover, in 2018 a study on male bottlenose dolphins(宽吻海豚) found that they keep their “names” into adulthood just like females—it was previously thought males abandoned their signature whistle to adopt the same whistle as their alliance(同盟) groups.

Dolphins can remember other dolphins after 20 or more years without contact by remembering their whistles, said Jason Bruck, an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Scientists analyzed 188 hours of recorded acoustic data collected by different research groups from 2006 to 2020. These sounds were recorded at six sites across the Mediterranean Sea, which is divided into west and east basins. There is genetic variation(差异) between eastern and western dolphin populations. Accordingly, the eastern and western basins were used as proxies(替代指标) for genetic variation.

The team extracted 168 individual whistles from the recordings and analyzed their acoustic features in relation to a few factors: precise location where the whistle was recorded, whether or not this was in the eastern or western basin, the local ocean environment and population demographics.

Ultimately, the scientists found that location only partially affected whistle variability.

Meanwhile, the environmental conditions and demographic characteristics did appear to strongly influence signature whistles—findings that align with the “acoustic adaptation hypothesis(声学适应假说),” the idea that animals acoustically adapt their vocalizations to their local conditions to optimize the purpose of their sounds. The study claims these are the foundational influences on signature whistle variability.

9 . Constantin de Slizewicz has been anxious to come back to China since early 2020.For the past decade, the Frenchman has been running a luxurious （豪华的）camping business in Shangri-La in the southwest of China's Yunnan Province. But in December 2019, he went back to France for a vacation. He usually goes back to France and stays there for two to three months, since there is little business due to the weather.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, however, he found it difficult to return. Fortunately, his business partner Guillaume de Penfentenyo was able to get a flight to China at the end of February.

Previously, most of his customers were international guests from outside the country who were drawn to the beautiful landscape and scenery in Shangri-La. Despite the pandemic（疫情）and even in his absence, Slizewicz's company managed to attract new tourists, who were unable to travel abroad under the circumstances and discovered the joy of camping. "It makes sure of our operation," he says happily.

Last year, his team offered summer camps in Shangri-La for Chinese students who couldn't travel abroad. In autumn, many domestic travelers also signed up for his company's organized adventures deep into the wilderness.

Slizewicz first visited China in 1996 when he engaged in a three-month internship（实习期）. He was impressed by the Chinese people around him and was attracted by places like Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, which were well-matched to his interest in camping-a passion he has had since childhood. "I met people in the mountains, singing and herding their yaks（牦牛）. That makes the mountains feel special and alive,” he says.

10 . Technology is more than an abstract concept associated with advanced tools and systems. It also shapes the way people behave, grow and develop, both within their own lives and in their relationships with others. While technology has developed over thousands of years, the last century has seen an explosion in technology that has influenced fundamental changes in how humans see the world and interact with others. Specifically, the Internet and mobile devices have completely changed the way people interact with each other. There has been a debate going on whether technology is benefiting human communication or ruining it.

Undoubtedly, technology is helping people build newer and necessary communication skills. In business, office employees and managers use technology to send emails to one another, which is considered a communication skill. On social media, just share a few of your images and people start communicating on and about your images according to their viewpoint. With the outbreak of COVID-19, in order to work on the projects, the students use their phones to reach their teachers and classmates.

However, technology is sometimes considered to disconnect people from others around them. With cell phones, most people think that it’s easier and more convenient to text instead of meeting in person. Lucas Lengacher, an undergraduate from Huntington University, claims in his article that at least 42.91% people respond to messages immediately yet only 2.83% people don’t check their phones in the morning. In his research he “found that almost 60 percent of people felt disconnected from others around when they were on their phones”.