Category: ideas

“Improvements in brain-computer interfaces will make the type of device previously confined to psychiatric laboratories available to the general public as some kind of entertainment. According to the developers, the first products should be in stores by the end of this year.”

A new study reports “that music helps people recover more quickly from strokes. And patients who listened to a few hours of music each day soon after a stroke also improved their verbal memory and were in a better mood compared to patients who did not listen to music or used audio books, the researchers said.”

“Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless–they are systematic. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over. So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.”

“We already know there is something special about the way musicians’ brains react when they hear music. Now new scans have revealed that specific regions of the brain dedicated to musical syntax and timbre become even more animated than usual in musicians when they hear recordings of their own type of instrument.”

“BMW Welt has just celebrated 100 days of activity. It presents, as an architectural phantasmagoria, an entire world organised and designed to BMW’s meticulous engineering standards. Scary or magnificent, depending on your perspective. At five minutes to midnight for the automobile, what does it mean?”

“Companies that empower their employees to cut costs in the workplace not only improve their bottom lines, but also may foster civic engagement and contribute to peace in the societies where they operate, according to research published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.”

” Public health officials link insufficient playtime to a rise in childhood obesity. Parents bemoan the fact that kids don’t play the way they themselves did — or think they did. And everyone seems to worry that without the chance to play stickball or hopscotch out on the street, to play with dolls on the kitchen floor or climb trees in the woods, today’s children are missing out on something essential.”

Europe struggles with integration of a growing Muslim minority. “Proponents of preventive capitulation would argue that because some immigrants are unwilling or unable to accept the rules of society, society should assume the immigrants’ rules. For them, ‘integration’ could also be defined as the need for the majority to conform to a minority.”

“For my money, what makes games unique among all other forms of entertainment is that they allow us to experiment with insanely dangerous physics. Games are only arena of modern life in which otherwise responsible adults are permitted to smash expensive things all to hell, purely for the sheer joy of it.”

“Nintendo’s Wii video game system, whose popularity already extends beyond the teen gaming set, is fast becoming a craze in rehab therapy for patients recovering from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries.”