Three years later, Dewan and Massie have a company, called Transatomic, with a million dollars in funding, an impressive board of advisers, and a vote of confidence from the Department of Energy, which recently awarded the pair first prize in their Future Energyinnovation contest. Russ Wilcox, a co-founder of E Ink, has joined as C.E.O. and resident grownup. In the months after their first conversation, Dewan and Massie drew up a design for a nuclear reactor that is small, relatively cheap, and “walk-away safe”: even if it loses all power, it cools on its own, avoiding a Fukushima-style meltdown. Theoretically, the reactor can put out as much electric power (five hundred megawatts) as a standard coal plant without belching carbon into the atmosphere. It can also run on nuclear waste, generating power even as it relieves another environmental burden. “We had this sense that there are so many unexplored aspects of nuclear technology,” Dewan said. “We knew that there would be something out there that would work, and would be better.”

Gareth Cook: The study of the links between biology and violence has a controversial and somewhat unsavory past. Can you tell me a bit about that, and what convinced you it is still a worthy topic?

Adrian Raine: Neurocriminology pushes a lot of peoples’ buttons for lots of different reasons. There’s the obvious historical misuse of biological research – think of the eugenics movement in this country when we sterilized mentally retarded people in an attempt to raise the overall IQ of the general population. Think of Hitler and the genocide that took place. So there’s always a potential for misuse, so of course we must tread carefully. But we also have to move forward to find new solutions to old problems, and neuroscience is offering us new vistas into the criminal mind that may in the future help us reduce violence. We need not resort to drastic measures to change the brain as we did in the past with frontal lobectomies.

There are other reasons for antagonism to a biological approach. Social scientists are concerned that shiningthe spotlight on the biological causes of crime will shift attention away from important social problems like bad neighborhoods, poverty, and racial discrimination. I can understand their perspective, and they are absolutely right that we need to eradicate these social inequalities. But unless we also tackle biology, violent crime is never going to go away.

The free-will debate also raises its ugly head. People are concerned about chalking up a good portion of crime and violence to genetics and biology — what does that say about choice and agency? Was it all determined from the get-go? Are we just gene machines destined to play out our programed nature in life? Let’s face it, nobody wants to hear that, do they?

And that brings us to politics. Conservatives don’t like my work because they think it will encourage a soft approach to crime – we’ll blame crime on the brain, not the person. But liberals don’t like it either because they think civil liberties are at stake – we’ll use biomarkers to identify who is at risk for violence and lock them up before they have committed a crime, the pre-emptive strike.

Then at the end of the day we get down to plain old interdisciplinary rivalries. Neurocriminology is a new approach that is attracting attention, and threatening the status quo. Other academics can get miffed that their own work doesn’t reach the spotlight. They’re human after all. They want to protect their own turf, and you can understand their frustration that their good science might not be getting the attention it deserves.

That’s a heck of a lot of baggage. So why, despite all this, have I thought for the past 35 years that it’s a worthy topic? Because science shows that 50 percent of the variance in crime is under genetic control. OK, so we could turn our backs on biology. Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist. Like an ostrich, we could bury our heads in the sand and pretend the hunter is not there. But the tragedy is that in our blind ignorance we’ll never have the biological insights to stop future violence. And you’d better watch out – the ostrich may get shot.

Cook: What are the strongest links between biology and violence, the results that are most widely accepted?

Raine: There’s no question whatsoever that genetic influences play a very significant role in shaping crime and violence. That can no longer be disputed. What can be debated is what specific genes are involved – and in what way. The gene that codes for the enzyme MAOA does seem to be involved at some level, but there’s still a long way to go in the hunt for genes that predispose to violence.

There’s also an explosion of brain imaging research. The most replicable finding so far is dysfunction to the prefrontal cortex, the “guardian angel” in the brain that controls our impulsive behavior and regulates our emotions. Damage that emergency brake on behavior, and explosive violence is not far away.

But you know, the neurobiology of violence is far from simple. We’re clearly going to find that it’s enormously complex. At the end of the day we’ll find that multiple brain systems are in on the act.  One prime suspect in shaping psychopathic behavior is the amygdala – the seat of emotion. Psychopaths have a core emotional deficit – they lack conscience, remorse, and guilt. They just don’t feel feelings the way we do. Several studies are documenting volume reductions in this brain structure in psychopaths. The amygdala is also less activated in psychopaths when they contemplate moral dilemmas. It’s as if psychopaths don’t have the feeling for what is right and wrong – even if they know it at a cognitive level. Still, we are just at the very beginning of a long journey into understanding the brain basis to violence. We have a very long way to go.

What else at the biological level? Lots of things. At a psychophysiological level something as simple as low resting heart rate is probably the best-replicated biological correlate of antisocial and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. We think it’s a marker for fearlessness and impulsive stimulation-seeking. High testosterone and low cortisol are hormonal candidates. In terms of neurotransmitters, low serotonin is a well-replicated correlate of impulsive violence.

But health factors are really important too, and in a way the seeds of sin are sown pretty early on in life. Mothers who smoke or drink during pregnancy are much more likely to have babies who grow up to become violent offenders. Poor nutrition during pregnancy also raises the odds of later offending. Even birth complications – especially when combined with social risk factors like the maternal neglect – raises the odds of adult violence. And let’s not forget environmental toxins like lead. They damage the brain, and not surprisingly are associated with antisocial behavior.

Cook: What do you think of the argument put forward by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, suggesting that violence has dropped dramatically as our social structures have changed?

Raine: The Better Angels of Our Nature was a masterful thesis that to my mind was right on the mark in its main argument – violence has indeed dropped over time. Sure, social structures that provide order and help contain violence have surely been a part of this, but the idea I particularly resonated to in Pinker’s book is the idea that thinking and reasoning has been one of our better angels. We’ve become smarter, more educated, and better able to reason, and partly for that reason we’ve moved away from violence.

And that’s really why I wrote The Anatomy of Violence. I want more people to understand why people commit crime. I want them to know the brain mechanisms behind these acts, and what factors, including environmental influences, shape the brain processes that predispose to violence.

Back in 1993, when I wrote an academic book, I finished with the argument that world history has shown that as society becomes more ennobled and sophisticated in its scientific understanding, conditions like epilepsy and psychosis ceased to be viewed within a moral / theological context and more within the humanitarian context of treatment. I repeat that refrain in The Anatomy of Violence. It’s something I sincerely hope for, a more enlightened society that can learn from a new and exciting body of biological knowledge on what causes offending. Chalking a violent act up to “evil” is easy, but it’s thirteenth century thinking. We need to move on into a more scientifically enlightened future.

To stop violence we have to understand its causes. For the past century we focused all our attention to only one side of the coin, the social contribution. Now it’s time to flip the coin over and examine the biological contribution. Unless we do that, we’ll never have the full picture, and we’ll go on living out the disheartening headlines that we read in newspapers today.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle.

It seemed like a breakthrough, offering new approaches to education and help for people with A.D.H.D., traumatic brain injuries, and other ailments. In the years since, other, similar experiments yielded positive results, and Klingberg helped found a company, Cogmed, to commercialize the software globally. (Pearson, the British publishing juggernaut, purchased it in 2010.) Brain training has become a multi-million-dollar business, with companies like Lumosity, Jungle Memory, and CogniFit offering their own versions of neuroscience-you-can-use, and providing ambitious parents with new assignments for overworked but otherwise healthy children. The brain-training concept has made Klingberg a star, and he now enjoys a seat on an assembly that helps select the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The field has become a staple of popular writing. Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?”

The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.

Over at the Cogmed Web site, though, it looks like lives are being transformed. A beaming child sits at a desk, pencil in hand, next to a quote extolling the results at a private school in Jacksonville, Florida. Cogmed training is helpful for all ages, from “young children to senior adults,” but is of particular interest to people with “diagnosed attention deficits” or “brain injury,” or those who “feel the deteriorating effects of normal aging” or those who “find they’re not doing as well as they could, academically or professionally.” The training is a method to “effectively change the way the brain functions to perform at its maximum capacity.” Cogmed is operating in more than a thousand schools worldwide, more than a hundred of which are in the U.S. In January, Cogmed launched a major push into American schools, which it charges up to three hundred dollars per child.

Cogmed and the other companies stake their claims on “working memory,” the ability to keep information the focus of conscious attention, despite distractions—mental juggling, in other words. There is powerful, widely accepted evidence that working memory plays an important role in everything from reading ability and problem-solving to reasoning and learning new skills. (It also seems to help with musical sight-reading and proficiency at Texas hold ’em.) And problems with working memory play a role in A.D.H.D., which has become an American fixation. Working memory is also closely related to “executive function,” the brain’s ability to make a plan and stick with it, an active and fruitful area of psychology with broad social implications. Many psychologists consider working memory to be a core component of general intelligence. People who score highly on intelligence tests also tend to perform well on working-memory tests.

The experiments by Klingberg and others suggested that working memory could be markedly increased through training, the same way that sit-ups create stronger abs—and, more importantly, that the training could bring broad benefits, the way weight training can make a person a better all-around athlete. In Klingberg’s first experiment, published in 2002, he recruited students with A.D.H.D. and gave them Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test of non-verbal reasoning that is used to measure intelligence. He then gave them regular working-memory workouts, increasing the difficulty of the games as they improved by giving them more to remember. At the end of several weeks of training, he reported, he gave the kids the Raven’s again, and they performed significantly better. He then found the same results in kids without A.D.H.D. The studies were small, but gradually other psychologists entered the field, and, in 2008, the psychologist Susanne Jaeggi reported an even more electric result: working-memory training definitively increased intelligence, with more training bringing larger gains. Her data implied that a person could boost their I.Q. by a full point per hour of training.

Over the last year, however, the idea that working-memory training has broad benefits has crumbled. One group of psychologists, lead by a team at Georgia Tech, set out to replicate the Jaeggi findings, but with more careful controls and seventeen different cognitive-skills tests. Their subjects showed no evidence whatsoever for improvement in intelligence. They also identified a pattern of methodological problems with experiments showing positive results, like poor controls and a reliance on a single measure of cognitive improvement. This failed replication was recently published in one of psychology’s top journals, and another, by a group at Case Western Reserve University, has been published since.

The recent meta-analysis, led by Monica Melby-Lervåg, of the University of Oslo, and also published in a top journal, is even more damning. Some studies are more convincing than others, because they include more subjects and show a larger effect. Melby-Lervåg’s paper laboriously accounts for this, incorporating what Jaeggi, Klingberg, and everyone else had reported. The meta-analysis found that the training isn’t doing anyone much good. If anything, the scientific literature tends to overstate effects, because teams that find nothing tend not to publish their papers. (This is known as the “filedrawer” effect.) A null result from meta-analysis, published in a top journal, sends a shudder through the spine of all but the truest of believers. In the meantime, a separate paper by some of the Georgia Tech scientists looked specifically at Cogmed’s training, which has been subjected to more scientific scrutiny than any other program. “The claims made by Cogmed,” they wrote, “are largely unsubstantiated.”

In a conference call, several Cogmed executives told me that they did not accept the conclusions, saying that the various scientists had unfairly overlooked good evidence in support of Cogmed’s regimen. They cited, as one example, Melby-Lervåg’s decision to not consider brain-imaging studies, which they believe offer additional evidence of neurological improvements that take effect after people play their games. “There is a lot of research excluded, almost to the point where it seems like the research is designed to reach a particular conclusion,” said Travis Millman, vice-president and general manager of Cogmed.

Yet to understand whether a student will be more effective in a classroom, it is only logical to rely on direct measures of the student’s capabilities rather than neuroimaging studies showing which parts of their brain are active in a lab. Melby-Lervåg’s criteria—randomized trials with suitable controls and well-designed post-training tests—would strike most psychologists as entirely reasonable. Cogmed’s representatives also told me that they had seen first-hand how much of a difference it could make. Yet anecdotal clinical evidence is notoriously unreliable. (In a variation of the placebo effect, when people participate in training programs, they genuinely believe they are getting better, whether or not that is true.) Cogmed has also published two responses to the scientific criticism on its Web site, both containing similar kinds of sophistry. When I reached Klingberg in Sweden, he told that the Melby-Lervåg paper used a “low scientific standard”—a rather stunning charge, given that the research appeared in one of the field’s best peer-reviewed journals. But then I read him parts of a note I had obtained, sent by Cogmed to school psychologists in the U.S., pitching their program’s benefits. “Working memory plays a key role in learning as it is crucial for reading comprehension, math, test-taking, following instructions, and understanding and retaining new information,” the note read. Klingberg, who is a paid scientific consultant at Cogmed, laughed uncomfortably and admitted it wasn’t fair to imply that Cogmed training would help with all those things. He has made suggestions to Cogmed about making the marketing more accurate, he told me, but, “I am not comfortable with everything that is said.”

Melby-Lervåg first became interested in working-memory training because she works with children who have learning disabilities, and she knew their parents were signing up for Cogmed. Pearson is a respected name that is strongly associated with education. “Since they work with children with learning disabilities, they have a responsibility to market programs that are evidence-based,” she said. “It’s unethical.”

The responsibility is so heavy because the needs are so great. Many people who have suffered brain trauma are haunted by a feeling of diminishment and a frustration that they can’t do more to help themselves. There are millions of children with learning disabilities who feel lost and ashamed. And then there are all the seniors who struggle with mental dissipation. These are the customers.

And, really, what’s the harm? Working-memory training doesn’t do any damage, one could argue. But that’s a dangerous and naïve view, argues Zach Hambrick, who was involved in the Georgia Tech study and is an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “If you are doing brain training for ten hours a week, that is ten hours a week you are not doing something else, like exercising,” Hambrick said. “It also gives people false hope, especially older adults for whom this is a big concern. What if they do this and they don’t see any benefits? What do you think? You think, ‘There must be something wrong with me,’ or ‘I am a lost cause.’ ”

Cook: Why did you set out to write a book about bullying?

Bazelon: Four years ago, I noticed a lot of news stories raising the alarm about “cyberbullying,” treating it as brand new, alarming, and epidemic. I wondered if that was true. I started working on a series for Slate, where I’m on staff, and I realized pretty quickly that 1)  there is no epidemic and 2) cyberbullying is mostly a new expression of a familiar behavior. It’s very much related to bullying that takes place in person. At the same time, moving online changes the dynamics of bullying—and what the experience feels like for targets—in important ways. So I set out to explore that.

Reporting on bullying connected to my longstanding interest in the role empathy plays in our lives, and in what makes kids resilient. I have two sons, who are now 10 and 13, so I also think about all of this as a mother—how to build character, what limits to set on technology, and other questions along those lines.

Cook: How big of a problem is bullying?
Bazelon: Bullying isn’t an epidemic, as you sometimes hear, and it’s also not on the rise, according to the studies that have tracked it over the past 25 years. But bullying does feel more pervasive for a lot of kids when it happens, because it often extends to the Web, which they can access 24/7. Going home from school used to give kids a break. That’s often no longer true. And now that bullying takes place on social networking sites, it is more lasting, more visible, more viral. That’s how the problem has changed over the last decade.

Cook: What do you think the public most misunderstands about the mind of the bully?

Bazelon: I think people typically have two images of bullies. The first (a boy) is the thug who steals your lunch money—Nelson on the Simpsons. The second is the Mean Girl who uses her social power to turn the school against you. Those bullies exist, in more three-dimensional, non-cartoon versions. But they’re not the whole picture. For example, there are also kids, known as bully-victims, who are both victims and bullies at different moments. They often have serious psychological problems, and for them, bullying is a cry for help. Even if that’s not true for the other types of bullies.

Cook: What are the links between bullying behavior and empathy?

Bazelon: In the moment, kids who act like bullies can seem frighteningly devoid of empathy—they freeze out those feelings, in a way that’s chilling. But in fact, for almost all kids, that is a temporary lapse: They are capable of empathy underneath the cold façade. One girl who was being mean to one of the main characters in my book (who is a 7th grader in Connecticut named Monique) made me cringe when she said at one point, “If she killed herself, it would be her own insecure problem.” But then later that same girl said, “I feel like Monique was just depressed, because she didn’t have a lot of friends. I could see that she’d walk in the hallways with her head down.” So she did understand how Monique felt, when she let herself.

Cook: People often have in mind a sense that certain kids are likely to be targets of bullies. What is actually known about this?

Bazelon: Boys who are targets of bullying tend to have less physical strength than other boys, and girls who are targets tend to be more submissive. Also, bullies often pick lower-status targets they already don’t like. Sometimes they trump up a provocation, but sometimes the conflict starts for a reason that feels real to them—even if a neutral observer wouldn’t see it that way.

Cook: At one point, you make a parallel between fighting cholera outbreaks and preventing bullying. Can you explain this?

Bazelon: In 1854, a doctor named John Snow figured out the source of a cholera outbreak in London: Contaminated water that people were drawing from one particular pump in Soho. He persuaded the city authorities to remove the pump handle, and the spread of the disease immediately subsided. That story led to a key public health insight: With the right kind of intervention, you can break the hold of a mass problem. And that helps the people who still get sick, too, because as the number of patients becomes more manageable, it’s easier for them to get the care they need.

A group of researchers at the University of Oregon applied this insight to improving school culture in the 1990s. The idea is that in a school with a lot of behavior problems, if you can find the intervention that turns chaotic hallways and classrooms into orderly ones, most students will respond accordingly. And the kids who continue to act out will often be the ones with more serious problems, and since the school no longer has to deal with an epidemic of misbehavior, it can more easily concentrate on getting them the attention they’re asking for. The University of Oregon team started a framework for addressing school climate, called PBIS (Positive Behavioral and Intervention Supports), which has shown success in reducing bullying.

Cook: How do they intervene?

Bazelon: PBIS is all about strengthening the connections between students and adults, for starters by building calm and order. Schools start by looking closely at the number of and reasons for referrals to the principal’s office—a key indicator of the health of a school, according to George Sugai, one of the framework’s creators. The idea is to figure out why exactly kids are getting referred for discipline and also where the bad behavior occurs. With the answers in hand, schools can address “hot spots” and then teachers can focus on students’ positive behavior—the ordinary things they do right during the day.PBIS wasn’t designed to address bullying directly, but a 2012 study by a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins found that teachers in PBIS schools reported less bullying and peer rejection than teachers in schools without PBIS.

Cook: What is known about the long-term harm that bullying does — and how to recover?

Bazelon: For both kids who bully and kids who are targets, bullying has been linked to low academic performance, ongoing emotional problems, and (for bullies) drinking and drug problems, and a higher crime rate. Especially for LGBT kids, there is some evidence that bullying increases the risk of suicidal thinking and suicide attempts, though it’s important to say that most kids who are bullied, or who act like bullies, do not become suicidal.

In terms of recovery, that really depends on the particular child and the level of bullying he or she has experienced. Some kids recover with support from home and at school—a simple thing like changing a bus route or taking a break from a social network site can help a lot. In fact, for many kids, there’s a lot of truth in the old adage, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger—they do have the capacity for resilience. Other kids need much more intensive support, like counseling. The key is to look closely at each case individually, and talk to kids about how they’re feeling. We’re not very good at this point at predicting when an experience with bullying, however unpleasant, helps build character, and when it leaves kids seriously vulnerable.

Cook: What are the best tools for parents? For kids?

Bazelon: For parents, here is a list of resources I’ve put together. And here’s a list for kids!

The essential point is this: The most important thing we can do about bullying, as a society, is to foster empathy and resilience in kids. This is a key insight at the heart of every good bullying prevention or character education effort. Most kids do feel or can learn to feel empathy and remorse. It’s our job to help them find that capacity within themselves, and build on it. And without minimizing the devastating impact bullying can have on some kids, most recover from it. We need to remember that kids have to confront some adversity, and learn to roll with it, in order to grow.

Photo courtesy Nina Subin

Cook: What is the biggest misconception people have about the dog mind?
Hare: That there are “smart” dogs and “dumb” dogs. There’s still this throwback to a uni-dimensional version of intelligence, as though there is only one type of intelligence that you either have more or less of.

In reality there are different types of intelligence. Different dogs are good at different things. Unfortunately, the very clever strategies some dogs are using are not apparent without playing a cognitive game. This means people can often underestimate the intelligence of their best friend. The pug drooling on your shoe may not look like the brightest bulb in the box, but she comes from a long line of successful dogs and is a member of the most successful mammal species on the planet besides us. Rest assured – she is a genius.

Cook: What are the “different things” that dogs are good at? What are the areas of dog intelligence you have studied?
Hare: We know that as a species, dogs are remarkable in certain areas, like taking someone else’s visual perspective, or learning from someone else’s actions. In particular, I’ve been interested in how dogs recruit help and how they take someone else’s visual perspective. However, most of my research with dogs has been about the cooperative way they use human communicative gestures. Or put more simply, how they can interpret our gestures to understand us or get what they want.

Cook: But other animals are intelligent, right? What makes dogs unique?
Hare: Absolutely. Other animals have their own unique genius that was shaped by nature. In the case of dogs it happens to be their ability to read our communicative gestures. We take it for granted that dogs can effortlessly use our pointing gestures to find a hidden toy or morsel of food, but no other species can spontaneously read our communicative gestures as flexibly as dogs can. It allows them to be incredible social partners with us, whether it’s hunting, or agility, or just navigating every day life.  Their ability to interpret our gestures also helps them solves problems they can’t solve on their own.

Cook: I see you have created a new website, Dognition. Can you tell me about it?
Hare: Dognition is about helping people find the genius in their dog. The only way to find their genius is to compare them to other dogs who all play the same cognitive games. As I said, different dogs use different strategies to solve problems. Does your dog rely on you to solve problems, or are they more independent? Do they pay attention to where you are looking before they decide to sneak food off the coffee table, or are they unaware when you are watching —  making it hard for them to be sneaky?

Dognition is all about playing fun games that will give you a window into your dog’s mind, and that will in turn enrich the relationship you have with your dog. On top of that, the data that you enter will contribute to a huge citizen science project that will help us help all dogs, from shelter dogs, to service dogs. Everyone who signs into Dognition will not only get an extensive cognitive profile of their own dog, but the data will be entered into a huge database that scientists can use to answer all these burning questions that we’ve never had the resources to answer, like breed differences. The largest single dog study published tested around 15,000 dogs. With Dognition and people’s help, we have the potential to test hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dogs. It’s an incredibly exciting project and I can’t wait to see what we find out!

Cook: …. Like the “yawn test”?
Hare: Even as young children, we laugh when we see someone laughing, and we cry when we someone in distress. Our ability to “catch” the emotions of others is called emotional contagion. A common form of emotional contagion is yawning. If you see, hear, or even think about someone yawning, you will probably feel an irresistible urge to yawn yourself. Contagious yawning is related to empathy scores in adults.

It looks like some dogs also contagiously yawn. The yawn test is just the owner yawning and seeing if their dog yawns back!  It’s a really simple test but it can tell you a lot about your dog.

Cook: How empathetic are dogs, truly, when it comes to their human partners, and how much is just our imagination, or our need to believe that they understand us?
Hare: As a scientist, it is hard to design tests that assess whether an animal is empathetic, because most research on empathy in humans relies on people reporting how they feel, and dogs can’t talk (or at least not yet in a way we can understand them).

But there is definitely something special about the bond we have with dogs. Their ability to read our communicative gestures makes them seem “in tune” with us. And their attentiveness to our every move can’t help but make us feel special. There is one study that shows that dogs would prefer to spend time with humans than their own species, which is unusual for an animal. Every dog owner is familiar with that rise in spirits as a thumping tail greets you at the door, and from the enthusiasm dogs have for us, it’s hard to believe the feeling isn’t mutual.

There are several measures, like contagious yawning, that show that dogs probably at least have a basic form of empathy (human infants who do not contagiously yawn typically have low empathy scores). And there are studies showing that dogs and humans experience a rise in oxytocin, the “hug hormone” when we hug and pet them (although it seems dogs get a higher boost in oxytocin when they are petted by women, as opposed to men!).

Cook: What is the “wolf event,” as you call it, and what is its significance?
Hare: The “wolf event” was a curious episode in evolutionary history where wolves basically took over Europe.  Between 1.7 and 1.9 million years ago, during one of the Ice Ages, a relatively small wolf called the Etruscan wolf spread throughout Europe. It was also around this time that humans were immigrating out of Africa.

But the wolf’s reign didn’t last long. As modern humans became the dominant carnivore, we have persecuted other large carnivores to extinction — which is why dogs are such an interesting puzzle. Some have proposed that modern humans adopted wolf puppies and raised them, but this doesn’t really make sense. Humans have never had a particularly amicable relationship with wolves — we tend to have a low tolerance for fanged predators, and the annihilation of wolves in the last thousand years almost lead to their extinction. Some say humans discovered that tame wolves were excellent hunting partners, but wolves eat a lot of meat – a pack of ten wolves would need a deer a day. And humans were successful hunters without wolves.

The puzzle is how the big bad wolf was tolerated around humans long enough to evolve into the mutt that now sleeps on the sofa. It took my childhood dog Oreo, a Russian genius, Siberian foxes, New Guinea Singing dogs, Hungarian scientists, bonobos in Congo, and a decade of research to figure out the answer.

And the answer is… you’ll have to read the book to find out. But to give you a hint –it’s not always survival of the fittest. Sometimes it’s the friendliest that have an evolutionary edge.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

What they read, however, didn’t square with the Lars they came home to every day. He was a happy, curious boy, and as he grew, he amazed them with his quirky and astonishing abilities. If his parents threw out a date — Dec. 20, 1997, say — he could name, almost instantly, the day of the week (Saturday). And, far more usefully for his family, who live near Copenhagen, Lars knew the train schedules of all of Denmark’s major routes.

One day when Lars was 7, Thorkil Sonne was puttering around the house doing weekend chores while Lars sat on a wooden chair, hunched for hours over a sheet of paper, pencil in hand, sketching chubby rectangles and filling them with numerals in what seemed to represent a rough outline of Europe. The family had recently gone on a long car trip from Scotland to Germany, and Lars passed the time in the back seat studying a road atlas. Sonne walked over to a low shelf in the living room, pulled out the atlas and opened it up. The table of contents was presented as a map of the continent, with page numbers listed in boxes over the various countries (the fjords of Norway, Pages 34-35; Ireland, Pages 76-77). Thorkil returned to Lars’s side. He slid a finger along the atlas, moving from box to box, comparing the source with his son’s copy. Every number matched. Lars had reproduced the entire spread, from memory, without an error. “I was stunned, absolutely,” Sonne told me.

To his father, Lars seemed less defined by deficits than by his unusual skills. And those skills, like intense focus and careful execution, were exactly the ones that Sonne, who was the technical director at a spinoff of TDC, Denmark’s largest telecommunications company, often looked for in his own employees. Sonne did not consider himself an entrepreneurial type, but watching Lars — and hearing similar stories from parents he met volunteering with an autism organization — he slowly conceived a business plan: many companies struggle to find workers who can perform specific, often tedious tasks, like data entry or software testing; some autistic people would be exceptionally good at those tasks. So in 2003, Sonne quit his job, mortgaged the family’s home, took a two-day accounting course and started a company called Specialisterne, Danish for “the specialists,” on the theory that, given the right environment, an autistic adult could not just hold down a job but also be the best person for it.

For nearly a decade, the company has been modest in size — it employs 35 high-functioning autistic workers who are hired out as consultants, as they are called, to 19 companies in Denmark — but it has grand ambitions. In Europe, Sonne is a minor celebrity who has met with Danish and Belgian royalty, and at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin in September, he was named one of 26 winners of a global social entrepreneurship award. Specialisterne has inspired start-ups and has five of its own, around the world. In the next few months, Sonne plans to move with his family to the United States, where the number of autistic adults — roughly 50,000 turn 18 every year — as well as a large technology sector suggests a good market for expansion.

“He has made me think about this differently, that these individuals can be a part of our business and our plans,” says Ernie Dianastasis, a managing director of CAI, an information-technology company that has agreed to work with Specialisterne to find jobs for autistic software testers in the United States.

For previously unemployable people — one recent study found that more than half of Americans with an autism diagnosis do not attend college or find jobs within two years of graduating from high school — Sonne’s idea holds out the possibility of self-sufficiency. He has received countless letters of thanks and encouragement from the families of autistic people. One woman in Hawaii wrote Sonne asking if she could move her family to Denmark so that her unemployed autistic son could join the Specialisterne team.

I first met Sonne, who is 52, in Delaware at a small conference he organized for parents and government officials who want to help him set up American operations over the coming year. He stood before them, sipping a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, speaking enthusiastically of his “dandelion model”: when dandelions pop up in a lawn, we call them weeds, he said, but the spring greens can also make a tasty salad. A similar thing can be said of autistic people — that apparent weaknesses (bluntness and obsessiveness, say) can also be marketable strengths (directness, attention to detail). “Every one of us has the power to decide,” he said to the audience, “do we see a weed, or do we see an herb?”

It’s an appealing metaphor, though perhaps a tougher sell in the United States, where you rarely see dandelion salad. It is also, of course, a little too simple. Over eight years of evaluating autistic adults, Sonne has discovered that only a small minority have the abilities Specialisterne is looking for and are able to navigate the unpredictable world of work well enough to keep a job. “We want to be a role model to inspire,” Sonne told me later, “but we can only hire the ones that we believe can fill a valuable role in a consultancy like ours.” In other words, he’s not running a charity. It is Sonne’s ultimate goal to change how “neurotypicals” see people with autism, and the best way to do that, he has decided, is to prove their value in the marketplace.

TDC, Thorkil Sonne’s former employer, is Specialisterne’s oldest customer. When I visited its headquarters in Copenhagen in June, it was obvious why the company finds it useful to engage autistic consultants. Whenever cellphone makers introduce a new product, there are countless opportunities for glitches. The only way TDC can be sure of catching them is to load the software onto a phone and punch the phone keys over and over again, following a lengthy script of at least 200 instructions. The work is tedious, the information age equivalent of the assembly line, but also important and beyond the capacity of most people to perform well. “You will get bored, and then you will take shortcuts, and then it is worthless,” explained Johnni Jensen, a system technician at TDC.

Steen Iversen, a Specialsterne consultant in bluejeans and a bright red polo shirt, showed me how he tackles the task. Iversen, who is 52 and has worked at TDC for four years, laid out several phones on a desk that also held his computer, two bananas, an apple and lines of lime green Post-it notes. He picked up a phone in one hand and demonstrated his technique, his thumb landing on the buttons in quick succession. But his real advantage is mental: he is exhaustive and relentless. When a script called for sending a “long text message,” Iverson keyed in every character the phone was capable of; it crashed. Another time, he found a flaw that could have disabled a phone’s emergency dialing capability, a problem all previous testers had missed. I asked Iversen how he feels at moments like that, and he gently pumped both fists in the air with a shy smile. “I feel victorious,” he said.

Over the years, Jensen has developed strategies for interacting with Iversen and the two other consultants he oversees. Trying to rush them inevitably backfires, he told me. “Sometimes I have to bite my tongue.” Jensen feels protective of the consultants and tries to shield them from the usual stresses of office work, but he is emphatic that the arrangement has endured not because he pities them but because their work is excellent. When Iversen finds a bug, he can recall similar ones from years past, saving Jensen the time and frustration of researching the problem’s history. And, Jensen says, the consultants are far more devoted to accuracy than neurotypical workers. Iversen has punched mobile-phone keys day after day, and not once has he cut a corner or even made a careless mistake.

Christian Andersen, another Specialisterne consultant, works at Lundbeck, a large pharmaceutical company. He compares records of patients who have experienced reactions to Lundbeck’s drugs, making sure the paper records match the digital ones. Errors can creep in when the reports are entered into the company’s database, and tiny mistakes could mean that potential health hazards would go undetected. So Andersen searches for anomalies, computer entry against written report, over and over, hour after hour, day after day.

Before Andersen arrived, his boss, Janne Kampmann, had a hard time finding employees who could do the job well. Most people’s minds wander as they go back and forth between documents, their eyes skimming the typos lurking there. Andersen, however, worked without interruption the morning I visited, attentive and silent until he lifted his head and, pointing to a sheet of paper, said to Kampmann, “Why do we have a 57 instead of 30 milligrams?” Kampmann told me Andersen is one of the best quality-control people she’s ever seen.

For years, scientists underestimated the intelligence of autistic people, an error now being rectified. A team of Canadian scientists published a paper in 2007 showing that measures of intelligence vary wildly, depending on what test is used. When the researchers used the Wechsler scale, the historical standard in autism research, a third of children tested fell in the range of intellectual disability, and none had high intelligence, consistent with conventional wisdom. Yet on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, another respected I.Q. test, which does not rely on language ability, a majority of the same children scored at or above the middle range — and a third exhibited high intelligence. Other scientists have demonstrated that the autistic mind is superior at noticing details, distinguishing among sounds and mentally rotating complex three-dimensional structures. In 2009, scientists at King’s College London concluded that about a third of autistic males have “some form of outstanding ability.”

This emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture — with its unwritten rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding work spaces — can be hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities around other people’s requirements.

Most Specialisterne consultants work in the offices of the companies that use their services, but some need to operate out of Specialisterne’s more forgiving work space. Even those capable of working on site sometimes get into trouble. In one case, the company was contacted by a medical-technology company, which needed help testing new prescription-tracking software. This seemed a marvelous bit of luck, says Rune Oblom, Specialisterne’s business manager, because there was a consultant on staff interested in illnesses. Everything was going fine until a medical team arrived to try out the software, and the consultant spent the entire morning recounting to them, in detail, the medical treatments that he, his mother and the rest of his family received over the years. Another consultant was assigned to finish the software-testing job. “I told him that the doctors were not very happy and felt he was a disturbing factor,” Oblom says. “But he couldn’t see it.”

The consultant has since been moved to another company, where he has done well at his professional tasks but still misses social cues. In Denmark, there is a tradition of bringing cake to the office on Fridays, and Oblom recently learned from the on-site supervisor that the consultant happily eats cake but has never volunteered to bring one himself. Then there was the time he tasted a co-worker’s cake and pronounced it terrible. Oblom told me that he plans to tell the consultant that he has to bring in cake now and then — and he will do it, Oblom predicts, without understanding the reason — but he’s not going to encourage the consultant to be more polite. The concept of socially mandated dishonesty would mystify him, Oblom said, so the other employees will just have to deal with it.

Specialisterne tries to anticipate, or at least mitigate, conflicts by assigning every consultant to a neurotypical coach. The coach checks in with the consultants regularly, monitoring their emotional well-being and helping them navigate the social landscape of the office. Henrik Thomsen, a jolly man who runs Specialisterne in Denmark while Sonne works on international expansion, told me about one consultant who is fascinated by train schedules. Severe storms can disrupt the trains around Copenhagen, and if the consultant’s train was delayed, he would start the day with a tour of his colleagues at the Specialisterne office, telling each how the commute played out, station by station. Sometimes another consultant would get annoyed and tell him to “cut the crap,” Thomsen says, “and then the real fun would begin.” So now Thomsen listens to the radio as he drives in, taking mental note of potential delays. When Thomsen arrives at work, he invites the consultant into his office first thing, listens to the day’s commuting story and then asks him to please get to work.

Specialisterne’s headquarters occupy part of a three-story complex in a Copenhagen suburb. Sonne showed me around the building: in addition to the consulting business, there is a nonprofit focused on spreading the Specialisterne business model, and a small school for people on the autism spectrum in their late teens and early 20s. In the largest room, boxes of Legos are stacked against one wall, and a pair of long, waist-high tables for Lego activities occupy the center, under a string of halogen lights.

When Sonne started the company, one of his biggest challenges was determining who would be able to thrive as a tech consultant in an office environment. A traditional interview was clearly not going to do the trick, and he had to think of other ways to identify marketable strengths in people who have difficulty communicating.

Lars had always enjoyed Legos, and talking to other parents, Sonne heard stories about how the toy bricks brought out remarkable, hidden abilities. “For many parents,” Sonne told me, “this was one of the few moments when they could be proud of their children.” So he decided to ask potential employees to follow the assembly directions included in the Lego Mindstorms kits and watch them build the robots.

This turned out to be so revealing that assessing job skills in the autistic population has itself become part of Specialist­erne’s business, with local government sending about 50 people a year to the company for five-month evaluations. (Specialisterne considers some for consulting jobs; others might end up doing clerical work, mowing lawns or other tasks for municipalities.) The Specialisterne evaluators place the candidates in groups for part of the time to see how well they work in teams, in addition to assessing the skills (reasoning, following directions, attending to details) that are naturally on display in a Mindstorms session. The assignments also reveal how a person handles trouble. More than once a candidate has become derailed because a Lego piece does not match the shade of gray depicted in the manual. Yet it is also not uncommon for a candidate to notice a struggling partner, stop and patiently explain how to get back on track.

The Specialisterne school uses Legos, too. Frank Paulsen, a red-haired man with a thin beard who is the school’s principal, told me about a session he once led in which he handed out small Lego boxes to a group of young men and asked them to build something that showed their lives. When the bricks had been snapped together, Paulsen asked each boy to say a few words. One boy didn’t want to talk, saying his construction was “nothing.” When Paulsen gathered his belongings to leave, however, the boy, his teacher by his side, seemed to want to stay. Paulsen tried to draw him out but failed. So Paulsen excused himself and stood up.

The boy grabbed Paulsen’s arm. “Actually,” he said, “I think I built my own life.”

Paulsen eased back into his seat.

“This is me,” the boy said, pointing to a skeleton penned in by a square structure with high walls. A gray chain hung from the back wall, and a drooping black net formed the roof. To the side, outside the wall, two figures — a man with a red baseball cap and a woman raising a clear goblet to her lips — stood by a translucent blue sphere filled with little gold coins. That, the boy continued, represented “normal life.” In front of the skeleton were low walls between a pair of tan pillars, and a woman with a brown pony tail looked in, brandishing a yellow hairbrush. “That is my mom, and she is the only one who is allowed in the walls.”

The boy’s teacher was listening, astonished: In the years she’d known him, she told Paulsen later, she had never heard him discuss his inner life. Paulsen talked to the boy, now animated, for a quarter of an hour about the walls, and Paulsen suggested that perhaps the barriers could be removed. “I can’t take down the walls,” the boy concluded, “because there is so much danger outside of them.”

In June, Sonne announced the opening of a United States headquarters in Wilmington, Del. The state’s governor, Jack Markell, was there, as was a representative from CAI, the company that is Specialisterne’s first real partner in the United States. The company says it plans to begin recruiting and training autistic software testers in Delaware next month, and if all goes well, it will expand the program to other states. Specialisterne is also talking with Microsoft about setting up a pilot program in Fargo, N.D., where it has a large software-development operation.

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and a regular contributor to The Times), published a much-discussed paper last year that addressed the ways that autistic workers are being drawn into the modern economy. The autistic worker, Cowen wrote, has an unusually wide variation in his or her skills, with higher highs and lower lows. Yet today, he argued, it is increasingly a worker’s greatest skill, not his average skill level, that matters. As capitalism has grown more adept at disaggregating tasks, workers can focus on what they do best, and managers are challenged to make room for brilliant, if difficult, outliers. This march toward greater specialization, combined with the pressing need for expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so-called STEM workers, suggests that the prospects for autistic workers will be on the rise in the coming decades. If the market can forgive people’s weaknesses, then they will rise to the level of their natural gifts.

“Specialization is partly about making good use of the skills of people who have one type of skill in abundance but not necessarily others,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. and co-author of “Why Nations Fail.” In other words, there is good money to be made doing the work that others do not have the skills for or are simply not interested in.

As Sonne tries to build up his business in the United States, though, he faces practical challenges. For one thing, in Denmark, the government helps cover some of the additional expense of managing autistic workers, and it pays Specialisterne so it can give its employees full-time salaries even though they only work part time. Specialisterne pays its consultants in Denmark between $22 and $39 an hour, a rate negotiated with unions, and in Delaware it plans to start with salaries between $20 and $30 an hour. And while two Delaware charitable foundations have pledged $800,000 to Specialisterne, Sonne estimates that it will take $1.36 million, and three years, for the business to become self-sustaining.

Another challenge involves expectations. A new stereotype of autistic people as brainiacs, endowed with quirky superminds, is just as misguided as the old assumption that autistic people are mentally disabled, Sonne says. Autistic people, like everyone else, have diverse abilities and interests, and Specialisterne can’t employ all of them. Most people Specialisterne evaluates in Denmark don’t have the right qualities to be a consultant — they are too troubled, too reluctant to work in an office or simply lack the particular skills Specialisterne requires. The company hires only about one in six of the men and women it assesses.

April Schnell, who is organizing a Specialisterne effort in the Midwest and has an autistic son, told me that she traveled to Copenhagen for a conference organized by the company for their volunteers from around the world. One day, she and the others were given the Mindstorms challenges used to assess candidates. As she struggled to solve one of the more difficult ones, she realized that her son, Tim, who is 15, would find the work uninteresting and probably too difficult: Specialisterne is not likely to be the answer for him. “I was just very aware, there is a gap here,” she said. “My heart was a little sad.”

One Friday evening, Sonne drove me to his house southwest of Copenhagen, navigating through whipping rain and the last clots of rush-hour traffic. Lars was waiting at the door to welcome us. Now 16, Lars evokes a Tolkien elf — thin and blond with exceptionally pale skin. He was outgoing from the start, eager to give me a tour of the house, yet he only glanced at my face.

Lars has the sweet demeanor of a much younger boy. Several times he affectionately rubbed his father’s head, the hair a short thin fur, calling the bald spot “Mr. Moon.” He gushed about trains, and at dinner Annette gently told him that we might not want to hear too much more about international conventions on track signals. I played Lars in a round of speed chess in the living room. There was never much doubt about the outcome, but at one point he issued an earnest warning: “Take care to not weaken your king’s position unnecessarily.” It was too late. After we put the pieces away, I complimented him on his final moves — an elegant and lethal attack with rooks, a bishop and a knight — and he did a balletic twirl, arms out. I joked with his family about how crushed I felt in defeat, and Lars walked over and put a consoling hand on my shoulder. Perhaps, I suggested to Lars, I would be allowed a rematch? “No,” he said simply.

When I asked Lars what he thought about his father’s company, he said he has played with the Mindstorms robots but does not see himself working there. “I want to be a train driver,” Lars announced. “It is the country’s most beautiful job. You get to control a lot of horsepower. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

At the outset, it was Thorkil’s aim to persuade Danish tech companies to hire his autistic employees. Now he wants all kinds of companies, all over the world, to learn from what Speecialisterne is doing. He figures that if he is successful, then maybe a national railway will consider hiring a candidate as seemingly unlikely as his son, as long as he has the right skills.

Certainly he has seen how transformative getting the right job can be for the autistic workers themselves. Before coming to Specialisterne, Iversen, who works at TDC, had not had a job for 12 years and spent the days sleeping and nights surfing the Internet. Niels Kjaer once worked as a physicist, receiving his diagnosis only after becoming clinically depressed when he didn’t get an academic job. When he came to Specialisterne, where he works on improving technology that grades eggs as they pass by on a conveyor belt, he was on sick leave from a job driving a cab.

Christian Andersen, who works at Lundbeck, the pharmaceutical company, was bullied and beaten for years as a schoolboy. He received his diagnosis at age 15 only because, fearing he might be suicidal, he checked himself into a hospital. After high school — inspired by a Hemingwayesque teacher who regaled his students with tales of outdoor exploits — Andersen tried a vocational school for landscaping. But he was overwhelmed by the requirement that he learn to drive. He tried another tech school but flailed, became depressed and had a breakdown in 2005. Andersen was living at home without prospects, playing video games. He couldn’t even land a job at a grocery store. Later that year, his parents encouraged him to apply to Specialisterne.

I joined Andersen one morning on his commute to Lundbeck’s headquarters across town. Riding on a yellow city bus, we talked about video games. He still loves Halo; Diablo 3 he finds frustrating. “You turn a corner and then — splat! — you are dead.” As we drew closer to the office, our conversation drifted to his job. He spoke with surprising insight about the psychological importance of work. “I have grown very much as a person,” Andersen told me. “I have become more confident and self-assured.” The job allowed him to move out of his parents’ house and into an apartment. After a while, Andersen informed me, he “started using body language.” It’s not something anyone taught him. He just watched people, he said, and “monkey see, monkey do.”

When he started at Lundbeck, he was constantly anxious because he dreaded making an error. Now the stress grips him far less often and is readily dispelled with a phone call to a coach at Specialisterne. He admits to being proud, having come so far. He was touched to be invited recently to join his department for some after-work bowling. But he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about these aspects of his employment anymore. “Of course it feels good,” Andersen said, “but there is such a thing as ‘here we go again.’ ” It’s only a job, after all.

Photo by Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times 

When I imagine them knowing, I can’t get an image out of my head: My seventh-grade English teacher, glaring at me, with a look that needed no words. You are lazy and stupid, Gareth. Why are you even wasting my time?

I am dyslexic.

Reading is slow for me. If I try to read aloud, it is halting, even with children’s books. I can’t spell.

I was never able to learn cursive, and I am virtually unable to take handwritten notes while someone is talking. If it weren’t for a strange quirk in the disorder – I can type notes and listen – I could never have hidden my struggles at work, because I wouldn’t be able to do my job at all.

In the last few months, there has been a burst of interest in dyslexia, with cover stories in Time and Newsweek inspired by a new book, Overcoming Dyslexia. The author, Dr. Sally Shaywitz, is one of a group of scientists who have made tremendous progress in understanding the disorder over the last few years.

I spoke with Shaywitz recently. The stigma is just starting to lift, she says. There is no reason to be ashamed. And that’s when I decided: time to come out of the closet.

For a long while, I had no idea what was wrong with me.

It started in the second grade, with spelling quizzes. I had to bring home the papers, awash in red corrections, for my parents to initial.

In fifth grade – an awkward enough time of life – there was the pure humiliation of spelling bees. I always went down in the first round. Everyone expected that.

As I got older, the spelling problems persisted – something that teachers marked down for and some English teachers took almost personally. I also found that I couldn’t really take notes, so I often teamed up with somebody else to study, trading help in math or science for his social-studies notes.

It was not until college, a decade and a half ago, that I learned what was behind it all. A friend of mine had just been diagnosed as dyslexic and was describing the collection of problems he was having. I remember thinking: Wait, that is me.

Dyslexia involves a problem with how the brain translates sounds and those funny squiggles on a page. Shaywitz has found that as someone learns to read, he moves from a laborious process of figuring out what each word is to fluency, where the brain instantly, effortlessly recognizes a word.

Dyslexics, for reasons that are still mysterious, have trouble making this transition. In her lab, Shaywitz has scans that show the brains of dyslexics activating in surprising patterns, as unusual parts of the brain jump in to help.

“Dyslexics learn to read, but they are never fully fluent,” says Shay witz. “It is like getting off I-95 and using the secondary roads. You can get there, but not as fast.”

This can be intensely frustrating. Reading has not been as hard for me as for many dyslexics, but if I try to write notes by hand while someone is talking, I am hit with a jarring, confused feeling. If you have ever tried to talk on a bad phone line, where your own words echo back at you, then you know this sensation.

I also have another embarrassing problem common to dyslexics, which is a profound inability to navigate around town, even relatively familiar places.

I often fantasize about these afflictions suddenly lifting. But Shaywitz believes that the unusual wiring of the dyslexic brain confers advantages as well, such as an increased ability to think conceptually and “outside the box.” I can’t get “Michael” right without the spell-checker, but sometimes I can see an entire story in my head at once and mentally rearrange the paragraphs.

I am writing this column reluctantly, because I don’t know what people will think; a part of me probably still believes that I should be ashamed.

But I also have to write this, because I know there is at least one kid out there who is feeling the despair that clawed at me for so many years. I want this kid to know: It’s never going to be easy, but put your heart into it and you will blow them away.

Hauser, you’ll recall, had built a brilliant career at Harvard. He directed a primate lab and published a long list of scientific papers on topics like the cognitive nature of morality, and the similarities between human and animal behavior. He was a popular teacher, and author of the hit book “Moral Minds.” And then it turned out that he was taking liberties with his scientific data. One paper was retracted, others were corrected, and, earlier this month, he left the university.

Also this month, federal authorities announced that a cancer researcher at the Boston University School of Medicine was inventing data. Two papers have been retracted. The scientist, and I use the term loosely, was shown the door.

These two cases are part of a remarkable flood of scientific retractions. Between 2001 and 2010, the number of retractions increased more than 15-fold, according to a recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal. There were 22 retractions in 2001, and 339 last year, according to the Journal, over a period of time when the number of publications increased by only 44 percent.

It would seem a grim development, this sudden scourge of epic sloppiness and outright fraud in the halls of science. But it’s actually news we should all welcome: We are not witnessing an explosion of misconduct, but a new openness about it.

There are some forces, including easy access to image manipulation software like Photoshop, that are making it easier to fake results. But the problem has festered for decades, and now, finally, science is beginning to get serious about dealing with it.

The most spectacular recent case of scientific fraud came out of South Korea. In early 2004, researchers there announced that they had cloned a human cell, earning front-page headlines around the world, and tantalizing the public with the prospect of future disease treatments. Invitations to collaborate poured in from top biologists. The South Korean government ensured that the lead scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, had every resource at his disposal. He was a national hero.

But it was all a work of fiction. Hwang had wasted people’s time and money, bringing disrepute to biology, and to science as an enterprise.

Scientific fraud can also have more direct human costs. One of the heavyweight champions in this category is Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who published a 1998 paper suggesting autism was caused by vaccines. The paper was an utter fraud, with invented patients. But the scare pushed down vaccination rates, causing outbreaks of measles. And his theory has persisted among many parents of autistic children, reducing support for urgently needed (genuine) research.

This is one of the most pernicious aspects of the problem: Bad ideas have a way of taking on a momentum of their own, even among scientists. One 2007 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at high-profile discoveries that were later contradicted by more reliable follow-up studies. Even years later, it reported, the initial (erroneous) “discovery” was still being widely and favorably cited.

One of the biggest obstacles to dealing with fraud in science is the sense, shared by scientists, that science is somehow exceptional as an enterprise. But science is a human endeavor and scientists are no better or worse than the rest of us. One sophisticated analysis suggested that at least 2 percent of scientists have cooked their data at least once – a statistic that is alarming, but also has the ring of truth to it.

Chastened by the Hwang scandal and others, scientific journals are more diligent in pursuing problems, and the Internet has made it easier for other researchers to check papers. But the scientific establishment’s efforts to discover and correct errors are scattershot and overly time consuming. Harvard’s handling of the Hauser case was almost laughably opaque. Scientists still don’t know what to make of many of his papers.

We need to do better. Science is a quest for the truth. And to know what is true, one must know what is false.