Category: ideas

What has changed is not so much the level of noise, which previous centuries also complained about, but the level of distraction, which occupies the space that silence might invade. There looms another paradox, because when it does invade—in the depths of a pine forest, in the naked desert, in a suddenly vacated room—it often proves unnerving rather than welcome. Dread creeps in; the ear instinctively fastens on anything, whether fire-hiss or bird call or susurrus of leaves, that will save it from this unknown emptiness. People want silence, but not that much.

“These companies aren’t out to nail trends, as the fast fashion manufacturers of past decades did, but rather to sell an all-encompassing clothing system through which consumers are meant to live. In tech terms, the brands are platforms and the products must be scalable, aimed at as wide and profitable an audience as possible, whether those products are fabric sneakers or ethically manufactured underwear. It’s clothing as software, embracing an ethos of one-for-all uniformity.”

Why does that make a difference? “The vocal variety now offered by these companies minimizes the subservient female assistant vibe. And as these assistants are increasingly being adopted in households with children, bossing around not just a female-voiced assistant seems like a healthy step in teaching gender equality and eliminating traditional gender role expectations. For younger children anthropomorphizing the bot, a changing voice may also make it clear that this is a computer entity, not a person.”

“It all began in a simpler time—February 2015 — on an ordinary Thursday evening when a photo of a dress posted on Tumblr got picked up by BuzzFeed. Was the dress white and gold, or blue and black? The question pitted brother against brother, friend against friend, caused celebrities to weigh in, and basically ground the internet to a halt. The dress was actually blue, but that hardly mattered. … What mattered was that the chasm between perception and reality had opened up, and we found ourselves teetering on the edge.”

There is a world that exists—an uncountable number of differently-flavored quarks bouncing up against each other. There is a world that we perceive—a hallucination generated by about a pound and a half of electrified meat encased by our skulls. Connecting the two, or conveying accurately our own personal hallucination to someone else, is the central problem of being human. Everyone’s brain makes a little world out of sensory input, and everyone’s world is just a little bit different.

A Dartmouth-led study finds that the brain may tune towards social learning even when it is at rest. The findings published in an advance article of Cerebral Cortex, demonstrate empirically for the first time how two regions of the brain experience increased connectivity during rest after encoding new social information.

Learning to see is not an innate gift; it is an iterative process, always in flux and constituted by the culture in which we find ourselves and the tools we have to hand. Harriot’s 6-power telescope certainly didn’t provide him with the level of detail of Galileo’s 20-power. Yet the historian Samuel Y Edgerton has argued that Harriot’s initial (and literal) lack of vision had more to do with his ignorance of chiaroscuro – a technique from the visual arts first brought to full development by Italian artists in the late 15th century.

For many, the idea of the ‘creative person’ comes from popular media, which inundates us with news stories and movie portrayals of the suffering artist and the mad genius. And there are anecdotal accounts closer to our real lives: many of us have heard stories about someone who suffers from a deep depression – but also creates beautiful poetry. Repeatedly hearing these accounts fuels a stereotype. When we frequently see two unique things (eg, extraordinary creativity and mood disorders) occur together, they become paired in our minds, creating what is termed an illusory correlation.