Category: ideas

Archaeological researchers have found plenty of information at digs in the Glauberg, in Germany, including the beautifully preserved statue of a Celtic warrior known as the Celtic Prince of Glauberg. But “it was thought unlikely that the mound would yield any more big surprises. At least that was the assumption until people with flying lasers showed up.”

“Darwin came to the conclusion that emotional facial expressions were universal: people all over the world made the same ones, and could easily and automatically recognise them in others. … But today the debate is alive and well again: while some researchers are claiming we are close to a full understanding of emotional expressions, others argue that we are nowhere near.”

“For decades, TV writing was a solitary pursuit, the writers alone in a room. Social media has transformed it. The process is now more like playing in a live band, with an audience cheering, booing, and hollering out requests. This is true across the cultural waterfront. As artists in all media go social–from novelists to painters to musicians–the very practice of their craft is becoming public.”

The phenomenon, basically the inverse of the placebo effect, is when “inert substances or mere suggestions of substances actually bring about negative effects in a patient or research participant” – say, when taking a sugar pill makes a person feel nauseated because he was told it would.

“Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Men, on the other hand, are processed as a whole rather than the sum of their parts.” (Men and women both do it, too.)

When Constantin von Economo discovered them in 1926, he called them “rod-and-corkscrew cells.” (They’re now called von Economo neurons.) “Certain lines of evidence hint that they may help build the rich inner life we call consciousness, including emotions, our sense of self, empathy and our ability to navigate social relationships.”

“It wasn’t actually the first satellite broadcast but because it was seen by so many people when it was on, it had a tremendous impact on people’s perception of distance and extension of their consciousness. Suddenly you could see across the ocean as easily as you could make a phone call.”

“On its face, the notion that the human instinct to make and appreciate art can be explained by evolution seems true, even a truism. We are the products of evolution in the things that make us distinctively human no less than in the things that we share with the lower animals.”

“How, one might ask, can quantum mechanics have anything to say about the human mind? Isn’t it about things that can be physically measured, such as particles and forces?”