Category: ideas

“Now an explanation has been offered in the form of research showing that people lose their sense of taste when listening to the sort of ‘white noise’ heard inside an aircraft’s cabin.”

“Being able to use two languages and never knowing which one you’re going to use right now rewires your brain. The attentional executive system which is crucial for all higher thought — it’s the most important cognitive piece in how we think — that system seems to be enhanced.”

It’s the biggest of all questions, and Michael Shermer lays out the ten (currently) leading answers from “God” to the “Grand Unified Theory” to various forms of multiverse to “It’s the wrong question.”

“Societies come together slowly, but can fall apart quickly, say researchers who applied the tools of evolutionary biologists to an anthropological debate.”

“When reporters ask Tim Berners-Lee about the moment he conceived of the World Wide Web, he can’t answer. He hasn’t forgotten, it just never happened. The idea percolated in his mind for nearly a decade … , He needed ideas of others to buzz around him and he needed an image that would make his idea understandable.”

“A study has found that dogs can be divided into two personality types based on their emotional outlook. ‘Bowl-half-full’ types are full of hopeful optimism, while their ‘bowl-half-empty’ kennelmates tend to expect the worst.”

“People building social robots in the West and in Japan are interested in ending up with two very different types of machines … Western robots are engineered to more explicitly express emotion, while those from Japan are generally as expressive as the masks worn by actors in traditional Japanese Noh plays.”

“Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of ‘research.’ … But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities – especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied – needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting.”

“By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’.” For many people, this idea “has become an unexamined fiction designed to skirt the culture wars. It is clear, however, that [this separation] is not only a fiction but a useless fiction.”

“The argument is an interesting one, and one that psychologists have pondered for years. Who is the authentic self – the rude or bigoted person who may come out when we’re drunk or enraged or exhausted? Or the person we are the other 99% of time, when sobriety allows us to tamp down our unsavory impulses?”