Featured series 
Tag: Intelligence
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Nation & World
Why Church Committee alums urged new House panel to avoid partisanship
Fritz Schwarz, former chief counsel of the 1975-76 U.S. Senate panel known as the Church Committee, discusses what it was like to undertake the largest, most consequential investigation of U.S. intelligence in American history.
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Nation & World
New University-wide institute to integrate natural, artificial intelligence
University-wide initiative made possible by gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg.
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Nation & World
How climate change will impact national security
The assistant director of research at the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project, Calder Walton talks about the recent U.S. intelligence report on the national security implications of
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Nation & World
Haiti assassination revives concerns over ‘private armies’
After authorities say Haiti’s president was assassinated by a hired hit squad, a former senior CIA career official talks about the world of private armies.
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Nation & World
Comey defends ‘nightmare I can’t awaken from’
During a Harvard Kennedy School visit, former FBI Director James Comey defends his decisions during the 2016 presidential election.
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Nation & World
Brainy birds
A new study shows that African grey parrots can perform some cognitive tasks at levels beyond those of 5-year-old humans. The results not only suggest that humans aren’t the only species capable of making complex inferences, but also point to flaws in a widely used test of animal intelligence.
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Nation & World
The worries over U.S. intelligence
After nearly six decades in U.S. intelligence, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper talks candidly about what he saw and learned protecting the country, and why he’s felt compelled in a new book to speak out about President Trump and the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
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Nation & World
Discerning bird
To look at him, Griffin doesn’t seem like he’d be smarter than your typical 4-year-old — he’s a bird, after all. But the African grey parrot can easily outperform young children on certain tests, including one that measures understanding of volume.
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Nation & World
Muting the Mozart effect
Though it has been embraced by everyone from advocates for arts education to parents hoping to encourage their kids to stick with piano lessons, two new studies conducted by Harvard researchers show no effect of music training on the cognitive abilities of young children.
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Nation & World
Polly want a vocabulary?
Irene Pepperberg, best known for her work with an African grey parrot named Alex — whose intelligence was estimated as equal to that of a 6-year-old child — recently relocated her lab to Harvard, where she continues to explore the origins of intelligence by working with birds.
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Nation & World
In the genes, but which ones?
A team of researchers, led Harvard Professor David I. Laibson and Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, has found that virtually all claims that intelligence is associated with specific genes are wrong.
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Nation & World
Intuitive? Try God
Harvard researchers exploring the roots of religion have found that intuitive thinking leads to belief in God, while more reflective thinking points toward atheism.
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Nation & World
Thinking like an octopus
A philosophy professor’s summer of diving in Sydney Harbour has gotten him thinking about what octopus intelligence might mean.
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Nation & World
Advances in genetics can help kids learn
Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained. Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them.
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Nation & World
Smile and the world smiles with you, but why?
“We are connected in ways we don’t consciously know, but which are absolutely essential for communication,” said psychologist and author Daniel Goleman at a March 14 talk on social intelligence sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. “There is a subterranean emotional economy that’s part of any interaction.”