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markfrankel18

What's a Metaphor For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...128079

TOK Language metaphor

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • "Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. ... Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways." Geary further unpacks metaphor's influence in his foreword: "Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."
  • The upshot of the boom in metaphor studies, Geary makes clear, is the overturning of that presumption toward literalism: Nowadays, it's believers in a literalism that goes all the way down (so to speak) who are on the defensive in intellectual life, and explorers of metaphor who are on the ascendant. As a result, Geary hardly feels a need to address literalism, devoting most of his book to how metaphor connects to etymology, money, mind, politics, pleasure, science, children, the brain, the body, and such literary forms as the proverb and aphorism.
Lawrence Hrubes

Rage Against The Machines | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...rage-against-the-machines

TOK prediction computers reason technology imagination chess

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Computers are very, very fast at making calculations. Moreover, they can be counted on to calculate faithfully—without getting tired or emotional or changing their mode of analysis in midstream. But this does not mean that computers produce perfect forecasts, or even necessarily good ones. The acronym GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) sums up this problem. If you give a computer bad data, or devise a foolish set of instructions for it to analyze, it won’t spin straw into gold. Meanwhile, computers are not very good at tasks that require creativity and imagination, like devising strategies or developing theories about the way the world works. Computers are most useful to forecasters, therefore, in fields like weather forecasting and chess where the system abides by relatively simple and well-understood laws, but where the equations that govern the system must be solved many times over in order to produce a good forecast. They seem to have helped very little in fields like economic or earthquake forecasting where our understanding of root causes is blurrier and the data is noisier. In each of those fields, there were high hopes for computer-driven forecasting in the 1970s and 1980s when computers became more accessible to everyday academics and scientists, but little progress has been made since then.
markfrankel18

Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams | Brain Pickings - 2 views

www.brainpickings.org/...schematics-julian-hibbard

TOK math emotion love arts diagrams schematics

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Schematics: A Love Story — a truly unique, in the most uncontrived sense of the word, project exploring love, memory, and time through 43 schematic diagrams drawn from old books and paired with poetic text that gleans new meaning from the geometric forms. From them emerges a layered and paradoxical narrative that is at once very personal and very universal, a kind of forlorn optimism about what it means to be human and to follow the heart’s sometimes purposeful, sometimes erratic, usually unpredictable will in pursuing the deepest of human connections.
Vicki Close

Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction - Mic - 0 views

mic.com/...eople-who-love-reading-fiction

TOK arts emotion language

shared by Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Literary fiction enhanced participants' empathy because they had to work harder at fleshing out the characters. The process of trying to understand what those characters are feelings and the motives behind them is the same in our relationships with other people. 
  • Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14
     
    Brain research finds that readers of literary fiction demonstrate increased levels of empathy over readers of non-fiction, social media and popular fiction.
Aidar Ulan

How the Color Red Influences Our Behavior - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...or-red-influences-our-behavior

TOK science perception emotion behvior

shared by Aidar Ulan on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • red regularly sways behavior.
  • Red is a powerful color
  • It means luck in China, where bridal wear is red, mourning in parts of Africa and sex in Amsterdam's red-light district.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Charged with social and cultural meanings
  • Whereas humans are trichromats—meaning that we have three types of retinal cones sensitive to long (red), medium (green) and short (blue) wavelengths—cattle are dichromats: they possess only two kinds of cones.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Sad Music - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01gmhx6

TOK music emotion arts psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Helena Merriman asks why people listen to sad music. A recent study has shown that sad music has become increasingly popular, but why do people choose to listen to it, and what goes on in the brain and the body when they do so? Helena speaks to Japanese pianist and music researcher Dr Ai Kawakami who has some surprising answers about some of the positive feelings people experience when they listen to sad music. American writer Amanda Stern tells Helena why she regularly listens (and cries) to sad music and British composer Debbie Wiseman, known for her moving TV and film scores, explains what makes a piece of music sound sad. You’ll also hear pieces of sad music suggested by BBC listeners from all over the world.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Do People Persist in Believing Things That Just Aren't True? : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ings-that-just-arent-true.html

belief false beliefs science psychology identity errors TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked.
  • Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. He found much speculation, but, apart from his own work and the studies that Nyhan was conducting, there was little empirical research. In the past few years, Nyhan has tried to address this gap by using real-life scenarios and news in his studies: the controversy surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, and anti-G.M.O. activism. Traditional work in this area has focussed on fictional stories told in laboratory settings, but Nyhan believes that looking at real debates is the best way to learn how persistently incorrect views of the world can be corrected.
  • One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief. But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.
Lawrence Hrubes

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ater-problems-disgusting-solve

science psychology emotion human sciences perception reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
  • In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
  • eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Disgust has deep psychological roots, emerging early in a child’s development. Infants and young toddlers don’t feel grossed out by anything—diapers, Rozin observes, are there in part to stop a baby “from eating her shit.” In the young mind, curiosity and exploration often overpower any competing instincts. But, at around four years old, there seems to be a profound shift. Suddenly, children won’t touch things that they find appalling. Some substances, especially human excretions of any sort, are seen as gross and untouchable all over the world; others are culturally determined. But, whether universal or culturally-specific, the disgust reactions that we acquire as children stay with us throughout our lives. If anything, they grow stronger—and more consequential—with age.
markfrankel18

What Are You So Afraid Of? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-are-you-so-afraid-of.html

TOK fear emotion evolution psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own absurd hierarchy, in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for the wrong things.
  • Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles
  • The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.
Lawrence Hrubes

China's Tradition of Public Shaming Thrives - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-public-shaming-thrives.html

ethics culture China punishment emotion propaganda politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • From primary school to university, I witnessed countless such public humiliations: for fighting, cheating or petty misdemeanors. Caught committing any of these offenses and you may have to stand before the student body, criticizing your own “moral flaws,” condemning your character defects, showing yourself no mercy, even exaggerating your faults. Only those who have endured it can know the depth of shame one feels.
  • The leading media outlet CCTV has provided a platform for many of the public shamings, which have included those of business people, screenwriters, celebrities, editors and journalists — anyone deemed to be on the wrong side of the Communist Party’s latest self-serving campaign. They speak to us from behind bars, their prisoner status made clear from their uniforms and (sometimes) shaved heads, their serious expressions and tearful faces.
  • Socialist countries tend to emphasize national and collective interest ahead of individual rights and dignity. This has been a constant throughout 66 years of Communist rule in China, but in the past two years the tendency has become increasingly strident. Cases of public shaming show us how in the name of some great cause, individual rights, dignity and privacy can all be sacrificed.
Vicki Close

Does reading fiction make you a more empathic, better person? - 2 views

www.slate.com/...re_empathic_better_person.html

TOK arts emotion language

shared by Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14
     
    Response to Science journal research paper by Castano and Corner Kidd reporting increased levels of empathy in readers of fiction. (http://mic.com/articles/104702/science-shows-something-surprising-about-people-who-love-reading-fiction)
markfrankel18

Why Music Communities Fight to Define Authenticity in Pop - 2 views

www.psmag.com/...ick-ross-authentic-music-50442

ToK Music Arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 May 13 - No Cached
  • “Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion?,” Frere-Jones asked. “No movie review begins, ‘Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in The Iron Lady.’” So the question remains: Why do music fans obsess about authenticity? What’s at stake when a fan argues, with emotions riding high, that Taylor Swift is too pop to be country, or that Green Day isn’t authentic punk rock? As a sociologist who studies music, I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand these authenticity debates—which, incidentally, span just about every style of 20th- and 21st-century music, from electronic dance to South Texas polka. And what I’ve learned is that, if you want to understand why authenticity disputes occur, it’s best to look first at when they do.
Lawrence Hrubes

Hellhole - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hellhole

ethics justice psychology torture emotion SocialScience human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?
  • Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.
markfrankel18

The Lifespan of a Thought Experiment: Do We Still Need the Trolley Problem? - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...409732

TOK ethics technology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • By the late ‘90s, trolley problems had fallen out of fashion. Many philosophers questioned the value of the conclusions reached by analyzing a situation so bizarre and specific.
  • It wasn’t clear trolleys could ever find a life out of the pages of academic journals until one philosophy graduate student, Joshua Greene, revived them with the modern techniques of neuroscience.
  • The ethicist Peter Singer cites Greene's research to support some of his positions about why we ought to make greater sacrifices for problems that may seem distant, like world poverty or a disease raging halfway around the globe.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But recently, trolley problems have found new life in a more realistic application: research on driverless cars.
  • He explained that many of the situations driverless cars will face involve conflicting priorities. When a vehicle has no option but to have a collision, which collision is it going to have? This is where trolleys come in.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-26151062

TOK maths math beauty emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14
     
    "Brain scans show a complex string of numbers and letters in mathematical formulae can evoke the same sense of beauty as artistic masterpieces and music from the greatest composers."
Lawrence Hrubes

How '-Phobic' Became a Weapon in the Identity Wars - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...apon-in-the-identity-wars.html

language emotion culture prejudice identity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The ‘‘-phobic’’ suffix has emerged as the activist’s most trusted term of art for pinning prejudice on an opponent. There’s ‘‘xenophobic,’’ ‘‘homophobic,’’ ‘‘Islamophobic,’’ ‘‘transphobic,’’ ‘‘fatphobic’’ and ‘‘whorephobic’’: Any blowhard who spews bigotry against a marginalized group — or any journalist who pens an article perceived as insufficiently sensitive — risks being called out for an irrational anxiety over one Other or another. When did this particular diagnosis become such a powerful weapon in the identity wars?
  • ‘‘Homophobia’’ was a hit. Weinberg had intuited that culture wars are waged not just in hearts and minds, but also in conversation.
Lawrence Hrubes

Meet the woman who can't feel fear - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-the-woman-who-cant-feel-fear

emotion fear brain neuroscience reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • "Tell me what fear is," Tranel began. "Well, that's what I'm trying to -- to be honest, I truly have no clue," SM said, her voice raspy. That's actually a symptom of the condition that stole fear from her. Urbach-Wieth disease
  • Even though she's a talented artist, she always has trouble drawing (or reading) a fearful facial expression. "I wonder what it's like, you know, to actually be afraid of something," she told Tranel.
  • That's actually just one of two times that SM has been held at knife point. She's also been held at gunpoint twice. And after the above incident, she didn't feel like she should call the police. The threat had passed. She didn't have any lasting trauma, because the event had failed to faze her. SM isn't stupid. She understands what can and can't kill her. But she lacks the quick, subconscious, visceral response that the rest of us feel when we're exposed to danger.
markfrankel18

Should we stop keeping pets? Why more and more ethicists say yes | Life and style | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...ore-and-more-ethicists-say-yes

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • “It is morally problematic, because more people are thinking of pets as people … They consider them part of their family, they think of them as their best friend, they wouldn’t sell them for a million dollars,” says Dr Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and one of the founders of the budding field of anthrozoology, which examines human-animal relations. At the same time, research is revealing that the emotional lives of animals, even relatively “simple” animals such as goldfish, are far more complex and rich than we once thought (“dogs are people, too”, according to a 2013 New York Times comment piece by the neuroscientist Gregory Berns). “The logical consequence is that the more we attribute them with these characteristics, the less right we have to control every single aspect of their lives,” says Herzog.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Should Artists Like Ai Weiwei Address Human Rights? - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...521520

arts ethics emotion refugees

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Last month marked six years since the start of the Syrian war, which has forced millions of people to flee their homes in one of the largest humanitarian crises in modern history. Perhaps the artist who has most visibly used his work to draw attention to the conflict is Ai Weiwei, whose political activism has earned him a reputation as China’s foremost creative dissident. Ai has made works focused on the refugee crisis for years, but lately his projects have taken on a greater sense of urgency. His newest exhibit, Law of the Journey, was recently unveiled at the National Gallery in Prague and features a massive inflatable lifeboat with 258 faceless, rubber figures on board—evoking the treacherous journey some refugees make to Europe.
  • Last month marked six years since the start of the Syrian war, which has forced millions of people to flee their homes in one of the largest humanitarian crises in modern history. Perhaps the artist who has most visibly used his work to draw attention to the conflict is Ai Weiwei, whose political activism has earned him a reputation as China’s foremost creative dissident. Ai has made works focused on the refugee crisis for years, but lately his projects have taken on a greater sense of urgency. His newest exhibit, Law of the Journey, was recently unveiled at the National Gallery in Prague and features a massive inflatable lifeboat with 258 faceless, rubber figures on board—evoking the treacherous journey some refugees make to Europe. Earlier this week, the Public Art Fund announced Ai would build more than 100 fence-themed installations in New York across multiple boroughs, asking the city’s inhabitants to reflect on the ideas of barriers, nationhood, and security.
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