Category: ideas

“Our findings suggest that individual differences in creativity may be related to a differentially activated network of evaluation that imposes a stricter process of evaluation, and hence inhibits creative production.”

The trick is how to serve us to keep us alive and well, as opposed to wiping us out…

“You will soon be able to slip on a Rift and be instantly transported to a mall with a couple of girlfriends to do some clothes shopping. Everything you see is your size, and you can try outfits on an avatar that has your identical proportions. You can match items with an online inventory containing a copy of every item of clothing in your real-world closet. See how the skirt goes with the shoes you picked up last week with a click.”

Maria Konnikova explores “the Dunbar number” – really a series of numbers describing how many friendly acquaintances, good social friends and close confidantes the human brain can generally handle – and whether social media is making Dunbar’s concept irrelevant.

In Dallas, some parents are keeping their kids home from school. Nearly 40% of Americans are evidently concerned that there will be an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. Certain TV pundits are energetically stoking the fear. A bioethicist explains where hypochondria comes from and why it isn’t entirely fair to callit irrational.

“Lives unfold socially, but often silently,” the researchers write. “Yet even in silence, people often share experiences, and the mental space inhabited together is a place where good experiences get better, and bad experiences get worse.”

“It wasn’t until the last decade or so that more fully realized, just-might-actually-happen sea-based urban endeavors have emerged, made more urgent by rising sea levels and rural-to-urban migration.”

“Facebook has every reason to manipulate the News Feed to optimize for whatever user engagement metrics correspond to the best returns for advertisers, which in turn correspond to the best returns for Facebook. And it has every reason to use other experiments in an effort to improve other parts of its operation.”

“People who had enjoyed something unusually wonderful ‘had little in common with their ordinary peers, who had a lot in common with each other, which made the extraordinary experiences both alien and enviable, which left them feeling excluded and sad.'”

“For the first time, women went out to drink too and occupied the same small, dark spaces as men. Couples started dating, instead of courting.”