Category: ideas

“The delight in these places comes from hearing a voice carry an unexpected distance, and this effect is more dramatic if the sound is a quiet whisper to begin with.”

“We rarely feel constrained by these because we forget that it could be another way. This is the power of culture to make alternative ways of life invisible and, as a result, gain massive public conformity to arbitrary norms and laws.”

“I know we live in a capitalist society where success is increasingly measured by quantity rather than quality but, for the sake of this exploration, set that aside if you can.”

“The stinging irony of the whole situation is difficult to dismiss: The very people demanding to know why English and art-history departments weren’t doing very well were often the people who’d helped drive students away from those departments to begin with.”

“When practitioners surrender their will, activity decreases in their frontal lobes, suggesting that speech is being generated from some place other than the normal speech centers.” Welcome to the study of neurotheology.

“Laughter is universal, but we know very little about the reasons we do it. Dr. Robert Provine has been studying the social and neurological roots of laughter for 20 years, and has come to surprising conclusions about how we operate as human beings.” (video)

“A study that tracked hundreds of Scottish people for decades is the strongest evidence yet that speaking an extra language slows the mental decline that accompanies ageing. The benefits hold regardless of your IQ and even if you learn your second tongue as an adult.”

“Neuroscientists believe that memory involves the modification of synapses, which connect brain cells, and numerous studies published over the past decade have shown that sleep enhances the consolidation of newly formed memories in people. But exactly how these observations were related was unclear.”

Adam Frank: “When computers finally become self-aware, will their first act be enslaving the obviously inferior human race? The answer, I think, is ‘no.’ But they won’t spare us out of altruism or a sense of responsibility to their creators. No, they will leave us alone because we bore them.”

“As predicted, participants rated the sculpture as higher quality when it was created by a single artist,” the researchers report. “As the number of authors increased, ratings of quality decreased.”