Category: ideas

Yikes: “Sensitive personal information, such as PIN numbers and credit card data, can be gleaned from the brainwave data of users wearing popular consumer-grade EEG headsets.”

Daniel Dennett, author of Freedom Evolved, Consciousness Explained, and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, ponders the question with Nigel Warburton.

“Researchers at University College London and Newcastle University found listening to two notes played simultaneously makes the brain adapt. Brain scans revealed highly specific changes in the hippocampus, which governs memory and navigation.”

Researcher Daniel Chamovitz: “Some people may not be comfortable describing what plants do as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. They certainly lack noses, eyes, ears, mouths and skin, but in what follows, I hope to convince you that the sensory world of plants is not so very different from our own.”

“[One] of the [scriptures’] abiding themes is precisely the ever-urgent need for human beings, if they are to find what is true and just, to maintain their capacity for independent thought and action. Almost every major hero and heroine of the Hebrew Bible is depicted as independent-minded, disobedient, even contentious.”

Average commutes to work tend to average 20-30 minutes. “It’s not just limited to the United States, either. In the Netherlands, the average commute time in the early 2000s was about 28 minutes. Many European nations average about 35 minutes. What makes a half-hour so universal in terms of commuting?”

“Wake up and smell the coffee. Or stay asleep and smell it. You might learn something either way. People can make new scent associations while they slumber, which suggests that sleep has real learning potential.

“A civil rights group in Togo is urging women to participate in a weeklong sex strike to put pressure on the country’s men to urge the president to resign. Do sex strikes ever work? Yes, but mostly as a means of garnering media attention.”

“Because elevated temperatures can indicate infection, the sutures monitor temperature at the wound site. The stitches can also deliver heat, which can aid healing.”

From the new Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness: “The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness … [M]any other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” (The octopus was the only invertebrate so honored.)