“Three University of Illinois psychologists present evidence that this equation only applies to Protestants – or, perhaps, people raised in a Protestant-dominated culture. … Jews and Catholics have a less-productive way of responding to uncomfortable thoughts and feelings: guilt.”
Category: ideas
Size Doesn’t Matter – When It Comes To Human Brains
Decades of research – starting with Einstein’s stolen and preserved brain – indicate that density of wiring matters far more.
Historians Of The Future: Sorry We Left So Much Stuff!
“Future historians will have hundreds of millions of images (from Instagram alone) of people’s daily lives. Add tens of millions of videos. And then there is the metadata–GPS locations for those posts and images, networks of friends and sharing, tags and hashtags!”
Studies Support Idea That Negative Emotions, Ideas, Can Be Successfully Channeled Into Art
“It has long been theorized that repressed anger or forbidden sexual desire can be a creative catalyst. After all, one way to exorcise internal tensions is to channel them into art.”
The Ways We Do Scientific Research Have Evolved. But Social Science?
“In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge.”
Why Does Time Seem To Speed Up As We Get Older?
“Don’t despair. I am happy to tell you that the apparent velocity of time is a big fat cognitive illusion and happy to say there may be a way to slow the velocity of our later lives.”
British Race Against Time And Salt Water To Rescue Trove Of WWI Submarines
“It had practically vanished from popular memory that the Germans caused great losses to their main enemy, Great Britain, in World War I through targeted torpedo strikes against the royal merchant navy.”
The Social Sciences Are Mired in The Past. Can We Move On?
“It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science”
How The Traveling Salesman Problem Is Reshaping Modern Life
“Every time you want to go somewhere, or you want something to get to you, the chances are someone is thinking at that very moment how to make that process more efficient. We are all of us traveling salesmen.”
The Meaning(s) of Cooking
“We make decisions every day about what to eat, and rarely do we choose our meals by empirical measures of biocompatibility or organic composition. The determination of what may be considered food – let alone what makes food ready to eat – is largely a cultural distinction. So Claude Lévi-Strauss noted when he observed and recorded the eating habits of tribal societies of North and South America in the mid-20th century. “