January 2012
11 posts
4 tags
The Rise of the New Groupthink. ‘Without great solitude, no serious work is possible’
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone,...
5 tags
What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology
Tim Maudlin: “There are problems that are fairly specific to cosmology. Standard cosmology, or what was considered standard cosmology twenty years ago, led people to the conclude that the universe that we see around us began in a big bang, or put another way, in some very hot, very dense state. And if you...
9 tags
‘Human beings are learning machines,’ says philosopher (nature vs. nurture)
“The point is that in scientific writing (…) suggest a very inflexible view of human nature, that we are determined by our biology. From my perspective the most interesting thing about the human species is our plasticity, our flexibility. (…)
It is striking in...
3 tags
Cognitive scientists develop new take on old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings “Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious — as a way for individuals to exchange information — linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam...
6 tags
The Rise of Complexity. Scientists replicate key evolutionary step in life on earth Green cells are undergoing cell death, a cellular division-of-labor—fostering new life.
“More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth’s surface began forming multi-cellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. (…)
...
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What are memories made of? “There appears to be no single memory store, but instead a diverse taxonomy of memory systems, each with its own special circuitry evolved to package and retrieve that type of memory. Memories are not static entities; over time they shift and migrate between different territories of the brain.
At the top of the taxonomical tree, a split occurs between...
6 tags
A risk-perception: What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
“Humans have a perplexing
tendency to fear rare threats such as shark attacks while blithely
ignoring far greater risks like
unsafe sex and an unhealthy diet. Those illusions are not just
silly—they make the world a more dangerous place. (…)
We like to think that humans are supremely logical, making decisions on the...
2 tags
Can A Scientist Define “Life”?
“Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. (…) When Portland State University biologist Radu Popa was working on a book about defining life, he decided to count up all the definitions that scientists have published in books and scientific journals. Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism. Others...
4 tags
Nicholas Carr on Books That Are Never Done Being Written
“I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I’d written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon’s...
4 tags
Scientists recreate evolution of complexity using ‘molecular time travel’
“Much of what living cells do is carried out by “molecular machines” – physical complexes of specialized proteins working together to carry out some biological function. (…)
In a study published early online on January 8, in Nature, a team of scientists from the University...
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Why Do Languages Die? Urbanization, the state and the rise of nationalism
“The history of the world’s languages is largely a story of loss and decline. At around 8000 BC, linguists estimate that upwards of 20,000 languages may have been in existence. Today the number stands at 6,909 and is declining rapidly. By 2100, it is quite realistic to expect that half of these...
December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Edward Glaeser: ‘Cities Are Making Us More Human’ Illustration: “The elevated sidewalk: How it will solve city transportation problems”, Scientific American, vol. 109 (July-Dec 1913)
“As opposed to the conventional wisdom, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser believes urbanization to be a solution to many unanswered problems, such as pollution, depression and a ...
8 tags
‘To understand is to perceive patterns’
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Pantheon, 2011
“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they...
6 tags
Do thoughts have a language of their own? The language of thought hypothesis The language of thought drawing by Robert Horvitz
“The mind thinks its thoughts in ‘Mentalese,’ codes them in the local natural language, and then transmits them (say, by speaking them out loud) to the hearer. The hearer has a Cryptographer in his head too, of...
11 tags
Infinite Stupidity. Social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers
A review of some big events
“Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what’s fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of...
November 2011
18 posts
6 tags
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on Human Language—Human Consciousness. A personal narrative arises through the vehicle of language
Jamie Marie Waelchli, Thought Map No. 8
“Human language, coupled with human maternal care, enables the consciousness to bifurcate very early and extensively. Without the self-reflective properties inherent in a reflexive agent- ...
4 tags
Are You Totally Improbable Or Totally Inevitable?
“If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.”
— Will Durant, American writer, historian, and philosopher (1885-1981)
“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you...
4 tags
The maps of the Internet
Click image to enlarge
The Opte Project was created to make a visual representation of a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting...
3 tags
The Human Brain Project ☞ reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer (Click image to go to the The Human Brain Project)
“The brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, is without any doubt the most complex organ in the body and it will be a long time before we understand all its mysteries. The...
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Raphael Bousso: Thinking About the Universe on the Larger Scales
“‘The far-reaching questions are things like how do we unify all the laws of nature, how do you do quantum gravity, how do you understand how gravitation and quantum mechanics fit together, how does that fit in with all the other matter and forces that we know?’ That’s a really far-reaching...
6 tags
Why Man Creates by Saul Bass (1968)
“Whaddaya doin?” ‘I’m painting the ceiling! Whadda you doin?” “I’m painting the floor!” — the exchange between Michaelangelo and da Vinci
“Why Man Creates is a 1968 animated short documentary film which discusses the nature of creativity. It was written by Saul Bass and Mayo Simon, and directed by Saul and Elaine Bass.
The movie won the...
5 tags
Non-Western Philosophy. The Ladder, the Museum, and the Web
“In philosophy today, (…) though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not. It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as...
5 tags
The Genographic Project ☞ A Landmark Study of the Human Journey
(Click image to explore Atlas of Human Journey)
Human Migration, Population Genetics, Maps, DNA.
“Where do you really come from? And how did you get to where you live today? DNA studies suggest that all humans today descend from a group of African ancestors who—about 60,000 years...
5 tags
Galileo and the relationship between the humanities and the sciences
“Ever since Galileo, science has been strongly committed to the unification of theories from different disciplines. It cannot accept that the right explanations of human activities must be logically incompatible with the rest of science, or even just independent of it. If science were prepared to settle for less than...
4 tags
Concentration. When Our Neurons Remain Silent So That Our Performances May Improve
(Whenever we look carefully for an object around us, the parts of the brain that are coloured in red are activated; but, at the same time, those in blue must deactivate themselves. (Credit: Image courtesy of INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)
“To be able to focus on the...
9 tags
How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration
Illustration: Oxford: Anthony Stephens, 1683
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest non radii solis neque lucida tela diei discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque. “Therefore it is necessary that neither the rays of the sun nor the shining...
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Fear, Greed, and Financial Crises: A Cognitive Neurosciences Perspective
NYT
“Far be it from me to say that we ever shall have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these...
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Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets’ The five regular polyhedra. Plato argued in Timaeus that these were the shapes of the bodies making up the elements: earth consists of little cubes, while fire, air, and water are made of polyhedra with four, eight, and twenty identical faces, respectively. The fifth regular polyhedron, with twelve identical faces, was supposed by Plato to symbolize the...
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And Greece created Europe: the cultural legacy of a nation in crisis
The Acropolis in Athens. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
“As the eurozone crisis rumbles on, we should not forget that it was ancient Greek literary and artistic forms that shaped the cultural unity of the European continent.
Let us not forget that Europe began in Greece. The idea of...
3 tags
How people respond to rules: People Rationalize Situations They’re Stuck With, But Rebel When They Think There’s An Out
“People who feel like they’re stuck with a rule or restriction are more likely to be content with it than people who think that the rule isn’t definite. The authors of a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of...
4 tags
The ‘rich club’ that rules your brain
The connectome with its 12 “rich club” hubs. Green means fewer connections, red means more connections (Image: Martijn van den Heuvel/University Medical Center in Utrecht)
“Not all brain regions are created equal – instead, a “rich club” of 12 well-connected hubs orchestrates everything that goes on...
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Daniel Kahneman on thinking ‘Fast And Slow’: How We Aren’t Made For Making Decisions
“We’re not in control because our preferences come from a lot of places that we don’t know about and, second, there are really some characteristics of the way a mind works that are incompatible with perfect decision-making. In particular, we...
3 tags
How walking through a doorway increases forgetting
“Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into these discrete...
October 2011
5 posts
4 tags
Researchers find a country’s wealth correlates with its collective knowledge
“What causes the large gap between rich and poor countries has been a long-debated question. Previous research has found some correlation between a nation’s economic prosperity and factors such as how the country is governed, the average amount of formal education each individual receives, and the...
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Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way. (…) We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain which brings with it its entire history, and...
4 tags
Kevin Kelly on information, evolution and technology: ‘The essence of life is not energy but ideas’
“Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang...
4 tags
Richard Feynman on Beauty, Honours and Curiosity — Richard Feynman, American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, Nobel Prize in Physics. The Feynman Series is a companion project with The Sagan Series (Full playlist)
See also:
☞ Richard Feynman and Jirayr Zorthian on science, art and beauty ☞ Richard Feynman on the likelihood of Flying...
5 tags
Time and the Brain. Eagleman: ‘Time is not just as a neuronal computation—a matter for biological clocks—but as a window on the movements of the mind’
“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Pantheon Books, 2011
...
September 2011
20 posts
8 tags
Why Does Beauty Exist? Jonah Lehrer: ‘Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity’
Interwoven Beauty by John Lautermilch
Curiosity
“Here’s my (extremely speculative) theory: Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention,...
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Vannevar Bush on the new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge (1945)
Tim O’Reilly on the Birth of the global mind “Computer scientist Danny Hillis once remarked, “Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.” (…)
The web is a perfect example of...
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Timothy D. Wilson on The Social Psychological Narrative: ‘It’s not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world’
“In the mid 1970’s, Tim Wilson and Dick Nisbett opened the basement door with their landmark paper entitled “Telling More Than We Can Know,” [pdf] in which they reported a...
5 tags
Why harmony pleases the brain
“The key to pleasant music may be that it pleases our neurons. A new model suggests that harmonious musical intervals trigger a rhythmically consistent firing pattern in certain auditory neurons, and that sweet sounds carry more information than harsh ones.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have known that two tones whose frequencies were related by a...
6 tags
Three looks at the Earth and the Universe
International Space Station “A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria,...
7 tags
Human Nature. Sapolsky, Maté, Wilkinson, Gilligan, discuss on human behavior and the nature vs. nurture debate
In this part of Peter Joseph’s documentary Zeitgeist: Moving Forward “The discussion turns to human behavior and the nature vs. nurture debate. This portion begins with a small clip with Robert Sapolsky summing up the nature vs. nurture debate which he essentially...
4 tags
Steven Pinker on the History and decline of Violence Raphael, The Judgment of Solomon, (1518)
“Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Steven Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two...
8 tags
Steven Pinker on the mind as a system of ‘organs of computation’
“I present the mind as a system of “organs of computation” that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other. (…)
Most of the assumptions about the mind that underlie current ...
6 tags
Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking
“The power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking, all of those are a major change in psychology. I can’t think of a bigger change in my lifetime. You were asking what’s exciting? That’s exciting, to me.”
“If you want to characterize how something is...
6 tags
Supercomputer predicts revolution: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space
Figure 1. Global geocoded tone of all Summary of World Broadcasts content, 2005. Note: Click on image to see animation.
“Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research.
While the analysis was carried out...
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Zygmunt Bauman: Europe’s task consists of passing on to all the art of everyone learning from everyone
“George Steiner persuades us that the main task facing Europe today is not of a military or economic nature, but rather a “spiritual and intellectual one”:
“The sacredness of the smallest details” is how William Blake would have called the spirit...
4 tags
Curiosity as a mechanism for achieving and maintaining high levels of well-being and meaning in life
“A primary interest [of this study] was whether people high in trait curiosity derive greater well-being on days when they are more curious. We also tested whether trait and daily curiosity led to greater, sustainable well-being. Predictions were tested using trait ...