Category: ideas

Eye-opening new research finds the happiest Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests. The two go hand-in-hand: Being social can help keep away the blues.

“There is little doubt that scientific research plays an important role in enhancing our quality of life and improving our future wellbeing. However, today the term ‘the research shows…’ is often deployed because we find it difficult to justify music or art or indeed anything cultural as true or good in its own terms. Yes, cultural entrepreneurs will sometimes rhetorically affirm that music is important in its own right – but increasingly such declarations come across as ritualistic.”

“An ear’s size is irrelevant; what matters are the properties of a shape that’s intrigued humanity for millennia, inspiring ancient Greek mathematicians and Renaissance painters and anyone who’s ever contemplated a nautilus shell or the center of a sunflower. As scientists better understand the cochlea, might they be able to tweak it? Could they someday make the bass on Junior Wilson’s ‘Dock of the Bay’ remix carry my brain out of my head and across the Pacific, just like it wants to?”

The only manipulation involved was color-coding, setting the virtual position of the camera, and some lighting effects. The project lives somewhere between pure art and information visualization.

Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing.

What if the problem with classical music isn’t that it’s elitist or stuffy, but that we’re so inundated with it that we can’t hope to truly appreciate or understand it fully? “It’s not just music — it’s cultural effusions in general… There is an overabundance of art around, and it can’t be properly digested.”

“Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information.”

“In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?”

“The literary critic as neuroscience groupie is part of a growing trend. We have become accustomed over the past half-century to critics sending out to other disciplines for “theoretical frameworks” in which to place their engagement with works of literature. The results have often been dire, the work or author in question disappearing in a sea of half-comprehended or uncritically incorporated linguistics, mathematics, psychiatry, political theory, history, or whatever. Why do critics do this?”

Riots broke out in cities around the US following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. But in Boston, one of the most racially polarized American cities, things stayed at a tense simmer, thanks in large part to the impromptu efforts of singer James Brown.