Social Brain

What’s truer than facts? The social value of great fiction

Blog

07 Oct 2013

I work in an organisation that revolves around social research and policy. I went to grad school to study the social sciences. And there is not currently a single novel in my to-read stack, except for the half-metre tower of Game of Thrones novels, courtesy of a colleague here at the RSA.

Taking Spirituality Seriously

Blog

02 Oct 2013

Jonathan Rowson

Later this month I will be giving a short talk at the beginning of an RSA public event introducing the project outlined in The Brains Behind Spirituality. I am arguing that we need a reappraisal of the cultural and social value of spirituality as essential foundational work for deepening our understanding of a range of practical and policy issues.

Smartphones make us dumb

Blog

26 Sep 2013

Jonathan Schifferes

Did you see the one about Apple Maps mistakenly directing people to drive across the runway at an Alaskan Airport? The coverage provides an indication of how much we’ve outsourced our intelligence to our smartphones, and how we are likely to erode our own intelligence as a result.

Applying behavioural insights to policy making

Blog

23 Sep 2013

Nathalie Spencer

The European Commission will be holding a conference at the end of the month on the theme applying behavioural insights to policy-making.

In memory of Dr Emma Lindley

Blog

20 Sep 2013

Nathalie Spencer

Readers of this blog may already be aware of the tragic news that Social Brain colleague Emma Lindley recently passed away.  Below, I offer to you a poem I selected and read in Emma's memory earlier this week at a staff gathering in her honour.  Tributes by colleagues Jonathan Rowson, Gaia Marcus, and Matthew Taylor are also available.

Emma.

Blog

19 Sep 2013

Jonathan Rowson

Following our Chief Executive's post earlier today, it is with deep sadness that we report that Emma Lindley, a regular contributor to these pages over the last two years, died at the weekend. The following was prepared for an RSA staff meeting yesterday to commemorate her time with us.

The Spiritual Injunction: know yourself as fully as possible

Blog

27 Aug 2013

Jonathan Rowson

The recent post 'The Brains Behind Spirituality' received an unprecedented number of page views on this site. As many giving feedback have mentioned, there will always be the problem of definition, but as I mention in the above piece, for any given fuzzy edged form of knowledge or inquiry - including 'spirituality' - the question to ask is not so much- what's the definition? But rather, what's the injunction? Sometimes it is worth pinning something down in words to give analytic traction, but sometimes it is more productive to ask what our intuitive grasp of the idea asks us to do, think or be in a more general sense:

The most productive act of leadership? Email less.

Blog

15 Aug 2013

Jonathan Rowson

80% of emails are a waste of time? I almost used that as a headline for a brief blog, and that's the statistic doing the rounds at the moment, but on closer inspection that 'statistic' looks like a guesstimate given to a journalist by a consultant with a vested interest in advertising his services....which is not to say he is not broadly correct(!).

The problem with kittens is they grow into cats

Blog

12 Aug 2013

Joe Hallgarten

The only consensus achieved during last week’s discussions about the UK’s baby boom was that yes, we are definitely having more babies. The facts can’t be denied; 813,000 babies were born in the UK last year, the highest number since 1972. With 254,000 more births than deaths over the year, and a smaller net migration gain, our population is rising faster than any other EU country.