“In summary, this study shows that the impulse to create emotionally expressive music may have a basic neural origin,” the researchers write. If their findings are confirmed, they will help explain “the human urge to express emotions through art.”
Category: ideas
What’s The Most Interesting News? Here’s What Some Of The World’s Best Thinkers Say
“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.” We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change.” Science has thus become a big story, if not the big story: news that will stay news.
Is Our Hyper-Connectedness Killing Our Ability To Be In The Moment?
“Everywhereness” describes how it feels when there is no longer any experience – meeting a friend, looking out of a window, feeling momentarily exasperated or exhilarated – that is particular to that moment, that place, those people. Social media make each moment four-dimensional by “scaffolding it with simultaneity, such that it exists in multiple places at once”.
Why The Internet Is Like A Rowdy Raucous Grateful Dead Tour
“The digital counter-tradition of what it means to be a Deadhead has long been in the ascendant through technology-based exegesis and curation of recorded materials. And the more time passes since Jerry Garcia’s death, the more being a Deadhead means streaming shows from the Internet.”
Does Speaking A Second Language Really Improve Cognition?
“The idea that learning to speak two languages is good for your brain has come to be widely accept as fact, particularly in popular media. … But a handful of attempts to replicate some of these seminal findings have failed to confirm this ‘bilingual advantage’ … [and] a heated debate over this issue now rages in the research community.”
The Tech It Takes To Figure Out The Secrets Of The Mummies
“CT imaging creates cross sections of the body, in addition to highlighting soft tissues. ‘We cannot say something about liver or heart diseases,’ says Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University who specializes in paleopathology. ‘But we can do a lot of anthropological work.'”
Our Gaps In Conversation Seem Universal, And Maybe Hard-wired
“When we talk we take turns, where the ‘right’ to speak flips back and forth between partners. This conversational pitter-patter is so familiar and seemingly unremarkable that we rarely remark on it. But consider the timing: on average, each turn lasts for around 2 seconds, and the typical gap between them is just 200 milliseconds—barely enough time to utter a syllable. That figure is nigh-universal. It exists across cultures, with only slight variations. It’s even there in sign language conversations.”
How To Control Your Facebook Feed
“Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action. It scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. For the average Facebook user, that’s more than 1,500 posts. If you have several hundred friends, it could be as many as 10,000. Then, according to a closely guarded and constantly shifting formula, Facebook’s news feed algorithm ranks them all, in what it believes to be the precise order of how likely you are to find each post worthwhile.”
If You Like Flops, You Might Be A ‘Harbinger Of Failure’
“In addition to relying on focus groups and instinct to decide which creative endeavors to back, publishing houses, music labels and movie studios might want to gauge how harbingers of failure react to a new project. If it’s a unanimous thumbs-up, the house may well have a loser on its hands.”
Page Views Don’t Matter Anymore, But We Still Think They Do
And that’s because we can’t figure out how to get advertisers to pay for our free news.