Category: ideas

“We understand in great detail the interrelated functioning of receptors in the tongue, the neurons that carry the signals, and the centers in the brain that receive the information. But explaining taste has not rendered it obsolete. No one has responded to these discoveries by giving up on delicious food.”

“Women experience more chronic pain and they’re less tolerant of the pain than men, according to a new review of research.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, very aware of his own unprepossessing visage, “seems to be suggesting that thinking – serious, sustained questioning – arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.” So does Socrates.

Says neuroeconomist Paul Zak of the brain chemical known as “the trust hormone” (and, sometimes, “the cuddle hormone”), “Civilization is dependent on oxytocin. You can’t live around people you don’t know intimately unless you have something that says, ‘Him I can trust, and this one I can’t trust’.”

“Before we start putting this stuff into the water, however, it’s worth asking the question: Does it also make us more gullible? Trust is great, but not everyone is trustworthy.” Luckily, new research indicates that oxytocin loses its effect “when a partner is perceived as dishonest.”

“An urban legend has developed over the years that the colors in modern astronomical photos are made up in a paint-by-numbers game by publicity-hungry astronomers.”

“The first thinking machine or anthropoid robot will be far more human-like than any pet dog or workhorse. It will [feel] natural to address such a machine as ‘you’ and unnatural to smash it to bits with a sledgehammer. … [Yet] how could we possibly have moral duties to a robot or a thinking machine any more than we do to a toaster?” (The Jewish sages have an answer.)

Jaron Lanier: “What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.”

The great hope of neuromarketing is to extract this hidden information directly from people’s brains. “We’re not asking questions at all – we’re recording responses at a deep subconscious level.”