“A raft of potentially therapeutic pharmaceuticals got left on the shelf in the backlash against the 1960s recreational drug explosion. Researchers are raising their own consciousness about which psychedelics might have real value.”
Category: ideas
The Developing Science Of Weeping
“Some new research efforts are helping to piece together the biological and cultural forces behind crying, showing that there are different types of tears as well as differences in the way men and women cry.”
Chapels – ‘Emergency Rooms For The Soul’
Pico Iyer: “They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our own lives – usually by finding all we aren’t, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up. … [They] have a stillness at the core of them that makes all discussion of high and low, East and West, you and me dissolve.”
Frank Gehry And “Creative Play”
Law professor Robert Benson – part of the panel that gave Gehry his first major, attention-getting commission – considers how playfulness figured in the architect’s creative breakthroughs.
We Behave Better When We’re Being Watched, Even If The Eyes Aren’t Real
“We tend to be on our best behavior when we know that we are being observed. While this may seem obvious, new research points to something far less obvious: it doesn’t take a fellow human being to make us feel ‘as if the world were watching,’ not even another living organism. All it takes is an image of a pair of human eyes.”
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – Is It Coming True?
“Researchers have considerably weakened – and perhaps even erased – long-term memories in … a type of marine slug, and in neurons in a lab dish, by blocking the activity of a particular enzyme.”
What Makes A Meme A Meme?
“‘Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,’ [Jacques Monod] wrote. ‘Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role’.”
Where Psychology Meets Building Design
“Recently, scientists have begun to focus on how architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health. They’ve discovered that everything – from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling, from the wall color to the furniture – shapes how we think.”
Are We In A Higher Education Bubble?
“In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in America; in 2006, there were 20.5 million. In X’s opinion, a glut of degrees has led to a spurious inflation of the credentials required for many jobs.”
Has Technology Sped Up Human Evolution?
“In most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia.”