Gary Stix

Gary Stix is a journalist and author. He is a Senior Editor at the Scientific American.

Education

Stix obtained his undergraduate degree in journalism from New York University.

Personal

He is married to Miriam Lacob.

Career

Stix is a senior editor for Scientific American and has worked there for over 20 years. He is currently responsible for covering neuroscience. He has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues of the magazine. He also reports and commissions articles on a variety of other topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity. Prior to working for Scientific American, Stix spent 3 years as a science journalist at IEEE Spectrum. He and his wife wrote a general primer on technology called "Who Gives a Gigabyte?"

Bibliography

Articles

• — "Wiki-Curious: Are you a 'busybody,' a 'hunter" or a 'dancer'?", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), p. 18. "'Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them.'"
• – "Thinking without Words: Cognition doesn't require language, it turns out" (interview with Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 3 (March 2025), pp. 86–88. "[I]n the tradition of linguist Noam Chomsky... we use language for thinking: to think is why language evolved in our species. [However, evidence that thought and language are separate systems is found, for example, by] looking at deficits in different abilities – for instance, in people with brain damage... who have impairments in language – some form of aphasia [ – yet are clearly able to think]." (p. 87.) Conversely, "large language models such as GPT-2... do language very well [but t]hey're not so good at thinking, which... nicely align[s] with the idea that the language system by itself is not what makes you think." (p. 88.)

References

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