Category: ideas

“In a year-long program focused on group music-making, 8- to 11-year old children became markedly more compassionate, according to a just-published study from the University of Cambridge. The finding suggests kids who make music together aren’t just having fun: they’re absorbing a key component of emotional intelligence.”

“[In] fact conversations are often designed to help this shifting take place. That is, when we engage in conversation, much of what we say does not involve making claims about the world but involves instructing our communicative partners how to adjust word meanings for the purposes of our conversation.”

“What’s happening in brain science at the moment is as exciting as the discoveries that are being made about the cosmos. Inner space and outer space. Maybe consciousness is a new kind of force, in the way electricity or magnetism is. It might be that, as we explore the brain, we come to an understanding of consciousness as being a separate property.”

As brain monitoring techniques become ever more precise, researchers and clinicians are discovering surprising things about out-of-body and “temporary death” experiences.

John McWhorter: “Yet the brevity, improvisation and in-the-moment quality of e-mails and texts are those grand old defining qualities of spoken language. … In this sense, they are not ‘writing’ in the sense we are accustomed to. They are fingered speech.”

The Pirate Party (of Pirate Bay fame, and yes, it’s real) in Germany has called for a law that will make free downloads of music legal. Then a pop musician and a Pirate Party politician hold a debate …

“Articles about American alienation may well feel true to those who long for simpler, happier times, but they’re built on fables and fantasies. In fact, there’s zero evidence that we’re more detached or lonely than ever.”

As a result of a massive fMRI data collection project currently underway, researchers may one day “be able to read your DNA and determine your innate level of anxiety, your propensity for drinking, and a range of other psychological traits.”

“A new study suggests that East Asians perceive emotion in faces differently from Westerners, casting doubt on the thesis – proposed by Darwin and widely accepted in psychology today – that human facial expressions are largely universal.”

“Weaving your way through a crowded party, you spot an old friend. Despite the surrounding chatter you have no trouble filtering out the other voices to focus on her words alone. How the brain performs this trick, dubbed the ‘cocktail party effect’, has been identified for the first time.”