Category: ideas

“Researchers have found that the brains of older East Asian people respond less strongly to changes in the foreground of images than those of their Western counterparts. They suggest this difference is due to an increased emphasis on the background, or context, of images in some Asian cultures.”

The US Supreme Court argued in a recent ruling that “the current patent regime threatened to stifle the sort of creativity that the Founding Fathers had originally created the system to foster. Courts have been upholding patents for technologies or designs that didn’t need them, that would have been developed in the ordinary course’ of events. In doing so, they have allowed bogus inventions to steal business from legitimate ones, and discouraged true innovation. To correct this, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for patent applicants to claim that they’ve actually invented something, while also making it easier for older patents to be challenged.

“In one sense, what has happened over the past 35 years could be described as the domestication of chess: the transformation of an abstruse game allied with innate brilliance (and madness) into an educational tool for training mental skills and attitudes. The new guise goes against the Bobby Fischer image–the temperamental, egocentric high-school dropout who cultivated his American rebel aura. It may even be that the mainstreaming of the game contributed to driving the chess monomaniac underground.”

“Classicists see O’Neill as adapting the ancient themes of Aeschylus to and for an America unsophisticated about classical tragedy. When O’Neill was asked why he returned to classical antiquity to deal with modern democracy, he responded that the Greek stage allows us to look into ourselves. Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle held up reason as the highest human faculty. Rational reflection was, they taught, the key to discovering life’s meaning. By grasping eternal and immutable truths, we could fathom who we are and why we exist, they believed.”

“We actually know surprisingly little about how culture develops. We understand a great deal about the emergence of social, cooperative behaviour – hunting, genetic diversification etc – but not very much about the development of cultural artefacts, such as dance, art and humour. We can theorise from archaeological finds, but the science is necessarily inexact as no one has ever been around to record the birth of proto-culture. Until now.”

“Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.”

“Boosters say toys with even the most basic brain wave-reading technology — scheduled to debut later this year — could boost mental focus and help kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and mood disorders. But scientific research is scant. Even if the devices work as promised, some question whether people who use biofeedback devices will be able to replicate their relaxed or focused states in real life, when they’re not attached to equipment in front of their television or computer.”

Brain scans show that younger people have more difficulty coping with loss than older pople do…

“Welcome to the age of neuroplasticity: the notion that adult brains are more adaptable, capable of reprogramming themselves, than was once thought. As a host of popularizers have begun to argue, neuroplasticity has enormous implications not only for our physical health but for our mental health.”

“What is critical to understanding someone is not necessarily having had his or her experience; it is being able to imagine what it would be like to have it. Thus, I do not have to be black to empathize with the toxic effects of racial prejudice, or be a woman to know how I would feel about being denied promotion on the basis of sex. Contrary to what many people believe, being empathic is not the same thing as being nice. In fact, empathy can sometimes be put to a very dark purpose.”