“Zombies belong to the realm of horror stories that reappear over and over throughout history – from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day sci-fi – because they raise a more terrifying fear than merely that of a gory death: the threat of eternal life.”
Category: ideas
We Need To Think About Anger – And Philosophy Can (Really!) Help Us Do It
Martha Nussbaum looks at two of anger’s main drivers, loss of status and the desire for payback, and looks to Aristotle and Nelson Mandela for examples of how to deal with them.
What Silence Does For Us
“We like silence for what it doesn’t do—it doesn’t wake, annoy, or kill us—but what does it do? When Florence Nightingale attacked noise as a “cruel absence of care,” she also insisted on the converse: Quiet is a part of care, as essential for patients as medication or sanitation. It’s a strange notion, but one that researchers have begun to bear out as true.”
How To Procrastinate Better (A Productivity Expert’s Tips)
“Q: If you’re going to procrastinate, are there better and worse ways to do it?”
Charles Duhigg: “There is no magic formula that applies to all people. What we do know is that often people are fairly bad at picking up on what is refreshing and rejuvenating, and so they tend to misevaluate what they should do as a break.”
What Science Knows About The Accuracy Of Trusting Your Gut For Decisions
“We humans are oddly fond of trusting our guts. Well, that might not be such a great idea: The same people more likely to go with intuition over rational thought are worse judges of others’ emotions, according to new research.”
Can A Brain Scan Tell What You’re Thinking? (Here’s What We Know So Far)
“To see if they could actually identify such patterns, the team had 80 people solve a series of math problems while lying in an fMRI scanner. Using a mix of otherwise standard methods from computer science and neuroscience, they identified a sequence of brain-activation patterns corresponding to encoding a problem, planning a solution, making the necessary computations, and providing a response.”
New Ideas? There Are Fewer Of Them Than You Might Think
“Human beings are extraordinarily good at deceiving themselves and possibly never more so than when they think that they have had a new idea, as Steven Poole makes clear in this fascinating compendium of new ideas that aren’t new at all.”
Here’s A Kind Of Synesthesia We Haven’t Encountered Before: Seeing Ideas As Shapes
“[Jonathan] Jackson sees his thoughts as shapes. Every person he meets, every sentence he reads, and every decision he makes are presented as data points on a kind of continuously moving mental scatter plot, creating figures he compares to constellations.”
We Live In A Public Time. So What Is The Role Of Public Intellectuals?
The real interest in the term “public intellectual” lies in what its usage can tell us about ourselves: how we imagine the links between politics and prose, thought and action, individual contemplation and social congregation. Why, for example, has the notion of publicness itself become such a high value for some, practically synonymous with benevolence, as if to attach “public” to the name of a discipline grants it a special dignity?
How Muybridge Captured Time
“Stanford had funded Muybridge’s work for years, and this was their most meaningful trial yet, so when Stanford’s horse trotted down the track at 40 feet per second, Muybridge was ready with his camera.”