Category: ideas

“Individuals often recall the same events differently or report memories of things they should have been too young to recall. … Brain connections that encourage the formation of false memories have been identified. Such memories appear to be more likely in people with high-quality links between neurons in a particular brain area.”

You get, for instance, a “focus on the connotations of what Hamilton in 1788, now thinking of ‘politics by analogy to architecture,’ called the ‘erection of a new government.’ This is a pity, but for a literary scholar … the image of ‘erection’ is too tempting to resist.” Or you get the suggestion that the issue of slavery and human rights is “more legible and meaningful when seen in the context of aesthetic disputes over neoclassicism.”

“Every regular flier has their favourite trick for kicking jet lag, from naps to caffeine. Now a computer program could take much of the guesswork out of these countermeasures, recommending precisely timed light treatments to reset the body’s circadian clock.”

“The human talent for abstraction — we can easily imagine places and spaces that don’t exist — comes with a hidden cost, which is that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution. We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from our setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town.”

From Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: “Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.”

“Others have noted the surprising ways that Calvinist ideas helped to legitimize representative political institutions [and the rise of capitalism]. Less widely acknowledged, though no less historically significant, is the profound impact of Calvinist assumptions on the formation of American patriotism – and in particular on the country’s sense of itself as an exceptional nation empowered by providence to bring democracy, liberty, and Christian redemption to the world.”

“And after 10,000 years of helping people keep down pests, their reward is to have their utility questioned in a new paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal. The researchers, led by Stephen J. O’Brien of the National Cancer Institute, an expert on cat genetics among other things, even call them ‘profiteers’.”

“It’s not only humans that can learn from watching television. Software developed in the UK has worked out the basics of sign language by absorbing TV shows that are both subtitled and signed.”