Category: ideas

A study out of U.Cal.-Santa Barbara “link[s] physical strength in men with both a propensity to anger easily and a favorable attitude toward the use of force to settle political disputes. … In other words, the ability to beat people up tends to breed a sense of entitlement, as well as a short fuse.” (But not in women – with them, it’s a different factor.)

“A series of studies suggests immersion in nature ‘brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends,’ according to a paper posted on the Web site of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This appears to be the first research to examine the impact of the natural world on people’s values and aspirations, and its findings have intriguing implications for architects, designers and urban planners.”

“Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses…. Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry.”

“Should we regard suicide — under the right circumstances — as the logical end of the Good Life? The question is raised by the death of the distinguished British conductor Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his wife Joan, 74,” whose children framed their deaths “as the culmination of the couple’s fruitful years together.” Michael Chabon, considering David Foster Wallace’s suicide, says that while “suicide is an idea alien to my way of thinking … [t]he world, like our heads, was meant to be escaped from.”

A look at “pseudo-histories” such as the Lost Continent of Atlantis, “preColumbian exploration and colonization of the Americas; the role of false history among such racist religious groups as Christian Identity and the Nation of Islam; [and] ‘histories’ of cosmic catastrophes and interplanetary visitations.”

“Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. … ‘Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally,’ they wrote. ‘But possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.’ Right.”

“By pooling a larger number of competitors — all of whose algorithms performed more poorly than those of the top two teams — The Ensemble produced the best results. It’s a profound lesson in the power of the crowd.”

“Even very young children absorb the messages they perceive from their immediate environment, and behave accordingly. So if yours are acting in a me-first manner, the obvious question becomes: Whose behavior are they mirroring?”

“Facial expressions, Charles Darwin argued … are a universal window into emotion. But new research challenges that notion, showing that east Asian people struggle to recognise facial expressions that western Caucasians attribute to fear and disgust. By focusing on eyes and brows, Asians miss subtle cues conveyed via the mouth.”

“We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.”