Category: ideas

“In September 1909, during his only trip to America, Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island” and “probably found it a little seedy.” {He did call America a “great mistake.”) Was the feeling mutual? Now an exhibition at the Coney Island Museum, “[c]reated by the media artist Zoe Beloff, … fills a room with drawings, photographs, artifacts and short films purportedly made by members of a previously unknown group of vocational Freudians founded, Ms. Beloff said, by a man named Albert Grass in the 1920s.”

When a decision-maker is forced to choose between two bad options, he or she tends to be judged harshly. That’s the conclusion of “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” a paper just published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“‘Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.’ So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart.” Why is this? “You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of ‘expert’ they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of ‘maverick,’ which is only a few stops short of ‘scapegoat’ or ‘pariah’.”

“[B]iologists don’t agree with one another on what a behavior is; biologists don’t agree with themselves on what a behavior is; biologists can be as parochial as the rest of us, meaning that animal behaviorists tend to reflexively claim the behavior label for animals only, while botanists sniff that, if the well-timed unfurling of a smelly, colorful blossom for the sake of throwing your seed around isn’t the ultimate example of a behavior, then there’s no such thing as Valentine’s Day.”

“Learning to move a computer cursor or robotic arm with nothing but thoughts can be no different from learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, according to a new study of how brains and machines interact.”

Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language: “After six months of living in India, I had gone from hard-charging New Yorker to a woman who preferred to keep her head covered.”

“Each language has one central vowel … in French, it’s uuu; in English, it’s the schwa sound. ‘It’s that central place that shapes your face at rest,’ [linguist Alton Becker] said. So language can subtly alter the positioning of the muscles in your face, at least for a time.”

“The role of the brain in determining how far and hard we can exercise — its role, in other words, in fatigue — is contentious. Until recently, most researchers would have said that the brain played little role in determining how hard we can exercise. But there are problems with the idea that fatigue involves only the muscles.”

“We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali’s various disorders and Sylvia Plath’s depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.”