“Take a risk and succeed, and you are a hero. Take a risk and fail, and you are to blame – even if it costs you your life. Risk and blame are the hallmarks of worthy personhood in contemporary American society. … But the puzzling question is why people who do not benefit from a system of blame – that is, most Americans – cling so fiercely to its creed.”
Category: ideas
Words And The Visual Subconscious
“It’s a case of hear no object, see no object. Hearing the name of an object appears to influence whether or not we see it, suggesting that hearing and vision might be even more intertwined than previously thought.”
Can Faith In Science Deliver The Same Benefits Religion Does?
“Carl Sagan famously offered science as a ‘candle in the dark’ to help illuminate a ‘demon-haunted world.’ … Can science, with its systematic approach to understanding nature, offer a satisfying portrait of the natural world and our place within it? Can science provide the same existential benefits typically thought to be the sole province of religion? Some recent psychological findings suggest that it can.”
The Danger Of Scientism
“Can you be a strident defender of science and still be suspicious of the way it is appropriated within culture? Can you be passionate about the practice and promise of science, yet still remain troubled by the way other beliefs and assumptions are heralded in its name?”
Why Do Some Ideas Just Catch On?
“Certain innovations have the power to reset reality. Cubism, like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Edison’s lightbulb, or Apple’s iPhone, was an idea that made everything around it seem instantly obsolete. When we think about why such ideas succeed, our instinct is to hail their creators as godlike visionaries, and their success as somehow inevitable.”
The Nature Of Consciousness: A Question Without An Answer?
“We don’t know how the brain creates consciousness, the subjective you. So, can machines do it, too? Commentator Marcelo Gleiser confronts ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ and finds a world in which what we can know may have its limits.”
Turkey’s Ancient Language Of Tweets, Trills And Whistles
“Many people aren’t connected to the Internet in this remote hilltop village. But tweeting is a very big deal. Residents here have for centuries communicated with one another using a series of elaborately trilled whistles known as ‘bird language’.”
Why Cities Are More Creative
“Social scientists will tell you it’s that same swirl of commingled ideas and constant interactions-albeit on a much larger scale-that makes cities founts of creativity.”
The “Like” Stampede
Researchers “were interested in answering a question that long predates the iPhone and Justin Bieber: Is something popular because it is actually good, or is it popular just because it is popular?”
How Romantic Jealousy Changes Us
One new study indicates that jealousy makes us want to become more like the individuals we perceive to be our rivals.