A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an article by Steven Johnson on how TV is making us smarter. The same guy's also recently written an article on the Flynn effect, which is worth reading. The Flynn effect refers to the fact that IQ scores have been steadily increasing in industrialized countries for the past few decades (the makers of IQ tests regularly "re-norm" their tests to allow for this).

And there's an interesting article in the latest Science & Consciousness Review about a new theory of why we evolved consciousness. Basically it's to do with the problem of how we distinguish between actual movements in our environment from apparent movements produced by the movement of our sense organs? An earthworm, apparently, solves its limited problem “by giant fibers in the segmented worm’s ventral nerve cord” - a mechanical solution. But earthworms have extremely limited senses. For animals like ourselves with many sense organs, capable of receiving complex information, the problem is much more difficult. This new theory is that subjective consciousness evolved to solve this problem.