“Perhaps not, if you believe a controversial new study that suggests violence in primitive cultures is overwhelmingly the result of personal squabbles, rather than organised violence between two different groups. The finding contradicts the popular view that humans have evolved to be innately warlike.”
Category: ideas
What Causes Deja Vu?
Some researchers believe – based in part on the experiences of certain epilepsy patients – that neural misfirings may be the answer.
The Limits Of “Neuro”-Answers To Everything
“In the mad rush to commercialize the new EEG technology, the neuromarketing researchers are currently gleefully painting over the logical and technical cracks in their methods with glossy results graphs and 3-D pie charts.”
Fear Of The Machine – Are We Screwed? (A Historical Perspective)
“With the advent of machines that are infinitely more intelligent and powerful than most people could have imagined a century ago, has the day finally come when technology will leave millions of us permanently displaced? Judging by the popular press, the answer is yes, and there is plenty of alarming data leading some people to support that view.”
Human Emotions Explained In 60 Short Interviews
The Experts in Emotion Series (available on YouTube) FEatures “some well-known psychology popularizers and writers (such as Steven Pinker discussing emotion and violence and Dan Gilbert on happiness), as well as experts across a range of psychological disciplines. Topics vary from crying and embarrassment to sex and laughter, with quite a bit in between.”
Alan Sokal Is Back
“British psychologist Nick Brown and two co-authors have just published an astonishing demolition of a top-ranked paper in the field of positive psychology … One of the authors of the critique is Alan Sokal, the physicist who, in 1996, famously wrote a parody of then-fashionable postmodernist theorizing and had it published as a serious paper in a sociology journal, thus sparking years of controversy.”
Can Speaking A Tonal Language Make You A Better Musician?
“If you heard a pair of melodies that differ by just one note, could you tell the difference? If you heard three musical notes, one of which was a tad sharper than the other two, could you pick out the odd one? These are precisely the sorts of tasks that trained classical musicians are very good at. And it turns out that speakers of Cantonese, a language with a built-in series of musical-like tones, are pretty darn good at it, too – better it seems than speakers of English.”
In Praise Of Anxiety
“Toss aside the bath water of anxiety and you will also be tossing aside excitement, motivation, vigilance, ambition, exuberance and inspiration, to name just several of the inevitable sacrifices. Get rid of anxiety? Even if you could — and you can’t — why would you want to?”
The Magna Carta Turns 800 Soon, And The British Library Is Partying
“The four surviving original copies of Magna Carta will be brought together in 2015 for the first time in history, the British Library has announced.”
Want To Be A Choreographer? Fire Up Your iPad
“The diversion is brief – the choreographed snippets range in duration from a few seconds to a minute or so-but it’s fun. More importantly, it puts the tablet to use in a way we don’t see as often as we should, not as a vessel for consuming existing forms of art but as a fresh new medium altogether.”