Category: ideas

“Despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold.”

“A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever in India’s Andaman Islands, taken to the grave with its last speaker.”

John “Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.”

A new study “finds an ostensibly meaningless physical activity — moving marbles upward — can cause people to think more positive thoughts.”

Results of a study in Switzerland “suggest that it may indeed be possible to detect whether a person is about to break a promise based on brain activity, well before the promise is actually broken.”

“There are powerful forces – such as the brain’s reaction to the presence of peers as a potent prompt and reward for sensation-seeking – that can move an adolescent to select risky behavior as the ‘right’ choice. … When you sit down to explain to your early adolescent why it’s unwise to climb the town water tower to have sex with predicate felons while doing nitrous, you’re acting on two assumptions that we now know to be false.”

“[D]oes the sense of purpose we feel as we leave school really stick with us as the years go by? And does it influence the kind of adults we grow into? Newly published research suggests the answers are yes and yes.”

“[D]espite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold.”

“For the good of us all, step away from the Rolex. The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study.”

Throw the suspect into a pool: if he floats, he’s guilty; if he sinks, he’s innocent. Or make the perp hold a red-hot iron, and if God heals the burn in three days, she is blameless. Today such methods of justice are dismissed as ignorant and barbaric, but a U. Chicago professor argues that, by leveraging defendants’ own superstitions, trial by ordeal made it “possible to secure criminal justice where it would have otherwise been impossible to do so.”