Category: ideas

Domestic pigs have shown that they understand mirrors and can use them to find hidden food. They “are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest.” Not to mention that they can roll out rugs, herd sheep (Babe was not an anomaly), and play videogames with joysticks.

A new paper “argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.”

Could touch screens and moldable clay interfaces replace traditional artist tools?

In an analysis of the cries of 60 newborns, half from German-speaking families and half from francophones, researchers found that “cry melodies were distinctive and different. The French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, while the German tots wailed with a ‘falling’ tone, a signature feature in each language.”

“Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.”

Remember that notorious 1966 issue of Time magazine whose cover read simply, “Is God Dead?” The article covered “what may be the last theological craze in history,” an intellectual movement “to turn Nietzsche’s proclamation of the deity’s demise from frightful blasphemy into the basis of a new kind of faith.”

“The couch’s lumpy, bumpy shape is a three-dimensional version of a brain scan, specifically a three-second recording of designer Lucas Maassen’s alpha brain waves as he closed his eyes and thought of the word ‘comfort’.”

“One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.”

“IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, … including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity – how much information you can hold in mind. But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgments in real-life situations.”

Psychologist Todd Kashdan points out that the two mechanisms evolved together and complement each other. “Anxiety is in fact one-half of a quite useful yin-yang process. Rather than resist it, he argues, we should acknowledge its existence and turn up the volume on the other side of the equation: the impulse that pulls us toward challenge and exploration.”