Category: ideas

Old phials in a 7th-century medicine factory now being excavated in Istanbul have been found to contain methanone (an antidepressant) and phenanthrene (a cardiac medication). And yes, there’s plenty of evidence that the Byzantines – and many other ancient cultures – knew about and used treatments for depression.

“Consider then what is meant by ‘showing off’. We use this phrase to designate behaving in a way intended to attract admiration. Showing off is not just doing something well before an audience. Jacqueline du Pré doing Elgar is not showing off. She is performing, playing cello before an audience. What distinguishes showing off is the intention behind the deed. When I show off, I do something for the reason that I want to attract your admiration. When we deem others to be showing off we make those judgments within a context of intricate sets of meanings. These are at best provisional and changing, and so too are the possible meanings we live out in our daily lives.”

“Lin-Manuel Miranda’s retelling of America’s revolutionary history allows for young Black, Latinx, and Asian-American students to see themselves in the figures responsible for our country’s birth.”

“Analysis of the brain scans revealed that differences in improvement of each behaviour were related to pre-existing differences in brain connectivity. In short, the flow of oxygen in the participants’ brains while at rest predicted how much specific aspects of speech or language skills would improve.”

The opacity of machine learning isn’t just an academic problem. More and more places use the technology for everything from image recognition to medical diagnoses. All that decision­making is, by definition, unknowable—and that makes ­people uneasy. My friend Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist, warns about “Moore’s law plus inscrutability.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says we need “algorithmic accountability.”

There are studies suggesting that as much as 80% of people’s laughter is at things they don’t really find humorous. Says one neuroscientist, “It’s a hall of mirrors of inferences and intentions every time you encounter laughter.”

As the surprisingly simple title of the study in question says, “Familiarity expands space and contracts time.” (See, boss? It’s science!)

“There are things you remember, and there are things you remember well. Even if you can recall a past event, your memories will vary considerably in how much detail they contain, and how correct those details are. In an elegant experiment, a team of neuroscientists … [at] Cambridge have shown that these aspects of our memories – our success at recalling them, their precision, and their vividness – depend on three different parts of the brain.”

“A positive mood is useful when first brainstorming, processing information, and coming up with as many ideas as possible—you don’t want to bring judgment into that, because it could stifle idea generation.
But rigor is the key to overcoming obstacles and completing tasks—and good mood doesn’t improve problem-solving, which involves judgments that almost by necessity won’t feel good: critique and evaluation, experimentation and failure. The stress that arises from problems may be unpleasant but it also motivates us to complete tasks, Davis says. In other words, negative emotions are actually beneficial to the creative process.”

“In areas like health care and transportation, we spend a lot of effort characterizing the performance and having a crisp understanding of how A.I. does what it does,” Eric Horvitz said. But with art, he added, “we want A.I. to be creative and make mistakes and meander.” Something may be gleaned from that whimsy.