Category: ideas

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett: The structure of the brain is such that there are many more intrinsic connections between neurons than there are connections that bring sensory information from the world. From that incomplete picture, she says, the brain is “filling in the details, making sense out of ambiguous sensory input.” The brain, she says, is an “inference generating organ.” She describes an increasingly well-supported working hypothesis called predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world. There would otherwise simple be too much sensory input to take in.

Dear designers: We need you to help create images that solve problems, bring clarity, inspire agency, and help those who want to “shape the future with pragmatic hopefulness.”

Trump’s tastes run to beauty shows and gold-plated belt buckles. His disinterest in the other arts does not bode well for them. At all.

Back in the 1980s in deepest Ontario, Dr. Michael Persinger hit on the idea of using a helmet with wire coils to stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain with particular patterns of low-level electromagnetic waves. Numerous people who wore the contraption reported feeling a presence, and sometimes the Divine Presence. The press got word, and the legend of the “God Helmet” was born. Problem is, other researchers have had trouble replicating the results.

It’s not – or not just – because some people [fidgets nervously] are lazy procrastinators: there’s a more benign, and basic, explanation.

“Bookshops are already filled with memoirs, diaries, accounts and letters by, for and about the ill. We seem to be living through a veritable ‘golden age of pathography’, as the historian Thomas Lacqueur observed recently. … But Lacqueur notes that asking deep questions isn’t the same as being able to answer them, or even being able to write well.”

Simon Critchley, on the connection between the “Brexistential dread” in his homeland and the fear and loathing on this side of the Atlantic: “The lesson of existentialism is that the nausea that we feel is actually the emergence of a genuine, lived sense of our freedom. Anxiety is the motor that drives the engine of freedom.”

“Do we see regularities in the unfolding of the past, or is history all disorganised confusion – just ‘one damn thing after another’? Are there laws that control the unfolding of history?”