“Although we always use the latest gadget as a metaphor for the black box of the mind — our nerves were like telegraphs before they were like telephone exchanges before they were like computers — the reality is that our inventions are pretty paltry substitutes. Natural selection has nothing to worry about.”
Category: ideas
‘Neurotheology’ – The Attempt to Explain Spiritual Experiences Medically
“For all the sickly Romantic geniuses out there who purportedly succumbed to the wild thrall of their passions – Robert Schumann, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, etc. – there have been as many doctors, psychologists, and literary Darwinists itching to diagnose them. … The not-always-subtle subtext is that unexplainable visions, or other divine madnesses, have no place in our enlightened, modern world.”
Could the Next Big Memory Aid Be a Cattle Prod?
“It’s a universal moment of dread. Someone with a familiar face approaches and panic ensues; you can’t remember his or her name. New research suggests that this embarrassing incapacity may be helped by a shock – of electricity, that is.”
Want To Be More Creative? Stop Paying Attention
“The scientists measured the success of 60 undergraduates in various fields, from the visual arts to science. They asked the students if they’d ever won a prize at a juried art show or been honored at a science fair. In every domain, students who had been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder achieved more: Their inability to focus turned out to be a creative advantage.”
Our Complicated Relationship With Machines
“We’re fascinated by machines that can imitate humans, but also feel an existential discomfort around them–an uneasiness that stems from their ability to obscure what seems like a fundamental truth of the universe, the line between the living and the inanimate.”
Is Privacy Dead?
“In the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That’s because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.”
Rethinking How We Rethink Technology And Books
“We now know the future of serious reading and writing lies on the screen. But how should we build that future? The conservative answer has been to reproduce each aspect of the book on the screen, adding some incremental changes like color pictures or video illustration to compensate for the expense and inconvenience. I think we can do more.”
Guilt, Repentance, and Innocent Bystanders
“New research finds when we make amends to assuage our guilt, a third party often pays the price.”
Humans Chasing the ‘Three Origins’ (Of the Universe, of Life, of the Mind)
“We seem to have a deeply ingrained need to understand where we come from, and know that our origins are enmeshed with the origin of the cosmos itself: since we are thinking chunks of stardust, to understand where we came from we need to understand where stars came from, how dust got assembled into living matter, and how living matter became thinking matter.”
It Takes a Church Like Scientology to Have Apostates These Days
“To make a true apostate you need a religious community that has, among other things, obvious insiders and outsiders. In the United States, with our promiscuous spiritual questing, many of us are never exclusively in one religion enough to one day find ourselves out of it. To leave some religious groups is to apostatize, while to leave other groups – notably mainline Christian groups – is simply to float away. It is hard to imagine a Unitarian-Universalist apostate.”