Category: ideas

Researchers have discovered that merely posting photocopies of eyes in a room makes people behave more honestly. “Eyes are known to be a powerful perceptual signal for humans. People behave more cooperatively when they are being ‘watched’ by a cute image of a robot or even abstract ‘eye spots’ on a computer screen. But this is the first time anyone has observed the effect in a natural situation, with people using their own money. It could have far-reaching implications.”

A few months ago, “researchers at West Virginia University stumbled across a gene in the mouse brain that appears to erase long-term memories. When scientists switched off the gene, the mice developed super-charged memory, able to recall the solution to a maze they’d seen six weeks before, an eternity in mouse time. The discovery is only the most recent in a flurry of breakthroughs that promise a new class of drugs that might help us retain newly learned information and stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s.”

“Why aren’t our finest regional [theatre] companies as well known as, say, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Orchestra? Ask any publicist and the first thing you’ll hear is that the media don’t take regional theater seriously. Each year it grows more difficult to persuade the arts editors of major newspapers and magazines — even those that pay fairly close attention to theater in New York — to send their drama critics to other cities, save for an occasional trip to London. As for TV, forget about it. I can’t remember the last time PBS aired an out-of-town production. Regional theater, it seems, just isn’t glamorous enough to make the journalistic cut.”

The Information Age was supposed to provide humanity with access to endless streams of information, carefully organized and readily available to anyone with a computer and a bit of know-how. But how are you supposed to take advantage of such bountiful excess when you’re forced to deal with a constant stream of pop-up ads you can’t get rid of, “informational” e-mails you didn’t ask for, and other newfangled distractions? It’s a serious matter, according to researchers who have been studying worker productivity, and the unceasing interruptions are having a profound impact on our ability to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

What do we do when the greatness of an artist’s work clashes with a serious flaw in his/her character? For years, the debate has raged around the music of Richard Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite whose music became, for a time, synonymous with the Third Reich. But what about the British composer Benjamin Britten, who has been known for decades to have been something close to a pedophile? Should this fact affect the way we listen to his music? Should we listen to it at all? The answers aren’t easy…

“New research shows a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry.” But don’t fret: A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge” is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world.

“After 17 World Cups, there’s now a mass of empirical data, and, using the most sophisticated methods available, we can now determine the political and economic conditions that yield soccer glory…”

“A Penn State biology professor with a passion for old prints and maps says he has found a new way to date centuries-old books by using a technique similar to what scientists use to study mutations.”

Feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change and the flood of new things to deal with? “Impressive change took place between 1950 and 2000, with the arrival of the computer, the Internet, cell phones, moon landings. But this period was no more impressive than 1810 to 1860 in which telegraph, railroads, the reaper, new printing technology, among other things, hit.”

“Platinum Blue Music Intelligence is a complex computer program that turns music into mathematics. It breaks songs down into 30 or so component parts including rhythm, melody, harmony, beat, cadence, timbre, pitch, and gives each a number. What they have found is just about all hit songs, no matter what genre, fit the same pattern.”