“[Here] is the dirty secret of anomalous phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance: They’ve been demonstrated dozens of times, often by reputable scientists [in peer-reviewed studies]. … Why, then, do serious scientists dismiss the possibility of psi? Why do rational people assume that parapsychology is bullshit? Because these exciting results have consistently failed the test of replication.”
Category: ideas
Birds, Like Humans, Tend Not to Listen to Foreign Accents
“New research suggests that our brains have a built-in bias against people whose accents don’t sound like our own.” Other researchers have “compared songbirds from Pennsylvania with songbirds from New York. They found specific brain cells in the Pennsylvania birds that responded to songs sung in their own accent, but they would stop firing when exposed to a New York accent.”
IQ: Minnesota Is Good for You and Florida Is Bad for You
“A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs.” (So that explains Canada …)
‘Gayness Was Invented in America’
Morgan Meis: “I’m not saying that America invented homosexuality, of course. That goes a little further back. What America did was to give gayness its specific difference, to make ‘gay’ into an identity you could have publicly like any other.”
The Neuroscience Of Stories We Tell Ourselves
“State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our ‘selves’ through narrative.”
Archaeology That Sounds Right
“The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is an new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.”
Why Scientific Innovation Needs The Arts
“Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience. And human experiences happen through engaging with the arts – listening to music, say, or seeing a piece of art.”
You A Good Reader? Maybe That’s Why You Have Trouble Recognizing Faces
“When the researchers showed participants pictures of faces, the visual word form area of those who could read was much less active than that of participants who could not read. So, the researchers speculate, learning to read competes with face recognition ability – in this part of the brain at least.”
Reality Is, In Effect, What We Make of It
Marcelo Gleiser addresses, for us civilians, “an old, and quite difficult, philosophical question: what is reality and how do we know? Let’s see what we can do in less than 1000 words.” (Warning: Hume, Kant, Einstein and “humancentrism” ahead.)
Want to Be Happy? Focus, Dammit!
“Using data collected from a specially designed iPhone app, the researchers – stay with me now – report we spend nearly 47 percent of our waking hours thinking about something other than what’s happening in front of us. Moreover, they write in the journal Science, this lack of focus tends to make us less happy.”