In "Avant-garde and Kitsch", Greenberg made a distinction between high art and low art, designating the former an anti-commercial form of art, and the latter as linked to business. In his eyes, autonomy from business was inherent to the work of art if art was not easily accessible, readable, and translatable, mainly by refusing visual representation and any other reference to recognisable objects or situations and moving towards an abstraction that went beyond the familiarities of the lives of ordinary people. The quality of an artwork was measured against the ease with which it could be understood, and if too accessible to the average viewer it would lose its aesthetic power and run the risk of being commodified. "What is 'graspable' by the viewer is also 'saleable' —was the modernist attitude. Hence, through a deliberate distance from the "lives of men" art was considered to escape its commodity status. This distance to life resulted in an elitism of (high) art that could only be properly perceived by "a handful of viewers, blessed with the 'faculty of aesthetic perception".

Though almost everyone lies, the ability to detect deception is a very difficult task for most people. The ability to recognize when someone else is lying can help an individual make better choices and prevent one from being manipulated by others. However, most adults have a truth bias and can only detect deception about 50 percent of the time or at about chance levels. Researchers argue that this inability to detect deception is likely connected to the fact that the vast majority of deceptive attempts are prosocial. Individuals lie to avoid hurting others, to prevent embarrassment, and to conform to. social norms. Since the bulk of lies are designed to promote social interactions and to improve self-esteem, it is not ultimately rewarding or beneficial to detect such lies. Accepting a compliment or believing an excuse is generally more advantageous than catching a liar, so most individuals do not put energy into sharpening their lie detection skills.

The tremendous increase in patenting among academics raises the logical question of the degree to which patents affect the sharing of material. Recent work by John Walsh, Charlene Cho, and Wes Cohen examines how patenting affects access to material and finds that it is largely unaffected, primarily because of issues related to lack of enforceability. Only 1 percent of academic researchers reported that they had delayed a project due to the patents of others; none reported abandoning a project. Moreover, only 5 percent reported that they regularly checked to see if their research could be affected by relevant patents, suggesting that infringement is of little concern. But not all institutions wink and look the other way when infringement occurs. Several cases of strong patent enforcement have been widely documented that have affected research. A recent example concerns human embryonic stem cells. The University of Wisconsin, whose researchers discovered them, has used its control, both through patents and material rights to the cell lines, to impose limits and conditions on use by other academics.

There are age and region-specific changes occurring in the brain during development. This includes converging evidence of prolonged development and organization of the prefrontal cortex throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood, suggesting important parallels between brain development and cognitive development. Such factors when considered in the context of development suggest that the links between neural and cognitive factors are in a continual, dynamic state of flux, with different neural tissues maturing at different rates in different regions of the brain while their ability to communicate with near and far systems through neural networks also are in a dynamic state of change. With development, more networks come online, although at different levels of maturity. During this extended time period, processing speed increases and communication between regions expands as a function of brain structure development and experience. Such a scenario stands in marked contrast to a more traditional position that static brain-behavior relations are established early in development that utilize a limited number of specific brain areas that interact in predictable and uniform ways.