Category: ideas

“All my ancestors were healers and performed rituals, even my surname Guslyak means ‘sorcerer’. Once a day my body convulses for 15-20 minutes. Reality changes in this condition and it takes special powers in order to return to normality. I still don’t understand everything.”

Some people use it “to solve problems, spur creativity, overcome nightmares or practice a physical skill.” Researchers are seeing early indications that the technique can improve cognition and help alleviate depression. “Many of the studies are small, however, and it isn’t always clear whether lucid dreaming is responsible for the improvements or simply linked to them.”

“Canadian researchers find synchronized movement to music can inspire altruism in 14-month-old infants.” The music used in the experiments? “Twist and Shout”. (Babies do enough of that already.)

We’ll adapt, argues Claude L. Fischer – just as we’ve been worrying about and adapting to new developments in information technology for two or three dozen centuries.

“Most authors wittingly or unwittingly provide their fictional characters with more behavior than physical description. Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random detail. We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We gloss over them. We elide. Our mental sketches of characters are worse than police composites.”

Recent research from Sweden found “that when dogs solved the problem and earned a reward they wagged their tails more and were more eager to repeat the experience than if they were just given a reward.” The study was inspred by earlier research showing a similar effect in cattle. (How could they tell?)

“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved.” (Simple daydreaming definitely counts as brain vacation, but it’s not. enough.)

“While computers have made large-scale number crunching far easier and faster than it was 20 or 30 years ago, that doesn’t mean that weather reports or graphs of seismic activity suddenly qualify as big data.”

“Metaphors are a fundamental mechanism through which our minds conceptualize the world around us, especially in the face of complexity. But evidence suggests they do more than explain similarities – they can invent them where they don’t exist, and blur the lines between the literal and the figurative.”

For that matter, what is a minute, really? Newton “believed that time was absolute – marked by God’s great metronome in the sky. It was certainly not subjective.” Einstein once wrote, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” And then there’s David Lamelas’s conceptual piece Time.