Category: ideas

“Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony. Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful? … Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers — and really, it’s about time.”

“If the traditional art market is driven by scarcity — with value bestowed upon rare and finite works created by an anointed few — it may be vulnerable to people like Jeffrey Lipsky, who capitalize on technology’s propensity for abundance, even if this means spending inglorious hours walking around virtual nightclubs, typing, “Hi, I’m Filthy Fluno and I’m an artist,” to strangers, and being willing, as Lipsky is, to sell multiple inkjet copies of his work to those customers who will pay $50 as opposed to the $500-$15,000 he charges for originals.”

Judith Warner: “But in real-life encounters, I’ve come lately to wonder whether meaningful bonds are well forged by the extreme solipsism that mindfulness practice often turns out to be.”

an interdisciplinary Northwestern research team for the first time provides biological evidence that musical training enhances an individual’s ability to recognize emotion in sound.

“To simulate the real world,” argues a team of British researchers, “all five of your senses must be stimulated. Toward that end, they’ve mocked up a ‘Virtual Cocoon’ with a separate glove that – at least in theory – could tickle your tongue as it, uh, nukes your nose.”

“A ‘time traveller’s phrasebook’ that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language. Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them.”

“Even if the American mania for shopping extends to our spiritual lives, church shopping still doesn’t get much respect. But while it may be frequently derided as an example of rampant spiritual consumerism, shopping around can be one of the good things about the way religion is practiced in America.”

“I’ve read the word shibboleth a hundred times, written it a few, and probably even said it myself, but I had never understood it until then [reading the story in the book of Judges]. It was a tiny but thrilling moment when my world came alive, when a word that had just been a word suddenly meant something to me. And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day when I was Bible-reading.”

“Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick may have best anticipated neuroengineering in his most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” in which the “main character and his wife get up in the morning and select their moods on what Dick called a Penfield mood organ. We’re a long way from building a Penfield mood organ, but we already have ways of prodding our brains.”

“[W]hy is it that commercial interruptions always ruin TV programs? Maybe they don’t. In two new studies, researchers who study consumer behavior argue that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.”