Category: ideas

A review of the published clinical trials indicates that, with a few limited (though important) exceptions, there’s very little scientific evidence so far for the health benefits that meditation is said to provide.

For years, researchers have reported that humans cannot truly multitask and that performance suffers when they try. Yet there seems to be “a tiny but persistent subset of the population – about two per cent – whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention.”

“Where did this strange American Bro come from, this alien, fist-pumping, Jager-bombing avatar of modern sexism, racism, and nihilism? … At what point did all strong homosocial relationships between men become conflated with the most vile and socially abhorrent behavior and egregious sartorial choices?” Jared Keller has a theory.

Columbia University’s Cloud Lab and a company called NeuroSky have been fitting out volunteers with brain-scanner headsets and having them walk around Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood; the headsets record second-by-second brain scans of the wearers’ responses to the cityscape. Is this science? (For now, they’re claiming it’s art.)

Inspired by claims that humiliation is an unusually intense emotion, responsible even for war and strife in the world, the researchers have turned to brain-based evidence. They claim to have provided the “first empirical, neurocognitive evidence for long-standing claims in the humiliation literature that humiliation is a particularly intense emotion.”

“People report this kind of thing all the time, and they use this same phrase: cannot unsee. Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. … We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. Ah! That’s not a vine, that’s a snake! That’s an LG logo. NO – it’s Pac-Man!”

Dean Olsher talks with a maker of build-your-own-casket kits, a mortician on his way to pick up a body, a paleontologist with the long view (the extra-extra-long view) of mortality, a historian who thinks we look at death the ways Victorians looked at sex, a retired surgeon who’d never want to go back to life before his cancer diagnosis, and an author who argues we should have our funerals while we’re around to enjoy them, (audio)

“It’s hard to think of anything more rational, more logical and impersonal than a number. But what if we’re all, universally, also deeply attuned to how numbers … feel? Why 2 is warm, 7 is strong and 11 is downright mystical.” (audio)