Category: ideas

“Compared with the rest of the world, Americans take personal hygiene and general disinfection to another level. … What makes us so eager to be clean? Is it noble and healthy, or should we relax a little?” Nine contributors offer their thought in this Room for Debate.

“Once you’ve built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experience a brain other than your own.”

“We binge on TV to craft time and space, and to fashion an immersive near-world with special properties. We enter a world that is, for all its narrative complexity, a place of sudden continuity. We may have made the world ‘go away’ for psychological purposes, but here, for anthropological ones, we have built another in its place.”

“Every time Gatsby says, ‘Old sport,’ spritz the air with Old Spice cologne and yell, ‘Hello, ladies!'”

“Fraud (the principal cause of retractions, which are up roughly tenfold since 1975) is not a new phenomenon, but digital manipulation and distribution tools have increased the spread and impact of science, both faulty and legitimate, beyond the confines of the ivory tower.”

The brain scans revealed “a pattern of neural changes” in those who had received compassion training, including “neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing.”

“The internet ideology is difficult to dislodge because it is not simply an immaterial ideal; it is materially embedded in a global infrastructure made up of machines, software, private businesses and public institutions. This infrastructure influences how we think and behave, and once locked in may be difficult to change.”

“The cloning service is popular among some Japanese women looking to preserve that special moment in life such as their wedding day, cloning hair & makeup and even the dress they wore.”

“‘The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,’ says [researcher] Viren Swami … Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.”

“Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements.” So what’s the point of higher education? Pleasure, says Gary Gutting. (Yes, that’s the word he uses.)