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But as lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious

He and his mother contracted the coronavirus in January, forcing them to quarantine in their small London apartment for over two weeks. Concerned by things he was saying, friends raised the alarm and referred him to mental health services.

“He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.

One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America

Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.

Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news.That’s true according to every available measure of size — the billion-plus people who devour its News Feed every day, the cargo ships of profit it keeps raking in, and the tsunami of online traffic it sends to other news sites.

But Facebook has also acquired a more subtle power to shape the wider news business. Across the industry, reporters, editors and media executives now look to Facebook the same way nesting baby chicks look to their engorged mother — as the source of all knowledge and nourishment, the model for how to behave in this scary new-media world. Case in point: The New York Times, among others, recently began an initiative to broadcast live video. Why do you suppose that might be? Yup, the F word. The deal includes payments from Facebook to news outlets, including The Times.

Yet few Americans think of Facebook as a powerful media organization, one that can alter events in the real world. When blowhards rant about the mainstream media, they do not usually mean Facebook, the mainstreamiest of all social networks. That’s because Facebook operates under a veneer of empiricism. Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of fair-and-balanced human beings.

Coronavirus ‘Hits All the Hot Buttons’ for How We Misjudge Risk

When you encounter a potential risk, your brain does a quick search for past experiences with it. If it can easily pull up multiple alarming memories, then your brain concludes the danger is high. But it often fails to assess whether those memories are truly representative.

If two happen in quick succession, flying suddenly feels scarier — even if your conscious mind knows that those crashes are a statistical aberration with little bearing on the safety of your next flight.

This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures.

Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain.

Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.

Warren’s adoption of “Latinx” is a different example of this problem: There’s no policy here, but the rhetoric still suggests that Warren is distinctively beholden to a hermetic academic-progressive world, to a point where she doesn’t know how to talk to the less-ideological, less-woke, maybe-even-somewhat-conservative Hispanics whose votes her party needs.

a related question is whether progressivism can succeed in consolidating the larger share of the Hispanic vote that Democrats expected in 2016 and didn’t get — an 80 percent rather than close to a 70 percent share, which would tip states like Florida and Arizona and even Texas and make Trump’s Rust Belt resilience moot.

Hispanics (and African-Americans and Asians) now represent the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, the pocketbook-conscious, somewhat culturally conservative flank

Tesla’s response to these videos has been consistent: Autopilot is meant to function as a complement to a conscious driver, not a replacement. If you don’t keep a hand on the wheel, your Tesla is supposed to beep at you; eventually it’s supposed to slow to a stop and put its hazard lights on. Anyway, who knows if these clips were real? Couldn’t some of them be the work of pranksters?

of course you can still fall asleep with a hand on the wheel — or you can go on YouTube and watch Tesla drivers swap tips for using a water bottle or custom “cellphone holder” to fool the system.

What’s fascinating is the way the sci-fi novelty of Autopilot — combined with the deep familiarity of old-fashioned driving — manages to warp our danger-detecting radar. There are instances in which investigators have found that the Autopilot system contributed to crashes, but none of those have been captured on film.

For MacIntyre, “rationality” comprises all the intellectual resources, both formal and substantive, that we use to judge truth and falsity in propositions, and to determine choice-worthiness in courses of action

Rationality in this sense is not universal; it differs from community to community and from person to person, and may both develop and regress over the course of a person’s life or a community’s history.

So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are also a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice

There is no way Wednesday's events could have happened without the convenience and ease afforded to white supremacists — and almost everyone else — by the openness of the modern consumer internet.

It's ironic, then, that the insurrection unfolded on the heels of President Donald Trump's continual efforts to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes it difficult to sue online platforms over the content they host (or don't) — or how they moderate it (or don't).

Section 230 is, of course, the rare law that is disliked by Republicans and Democrats. Biden hates it, having said: "I think social media should be more socially conscious in terms of what is important in terms of our democracy. ... Everything should not be about whether they can make a buck."

Keller's writing jars the contemporary reader in three ways. First, she composes in the grandiose manner favored by the late-19th-century genteel essayist, with lots of quotations and inverted sentences. Second, she gushes with a girlish gratefulness that registers, in our more cynical time, as more ingratiating than genuine

Keller violates a cardinal rule of autobiography, which is to distinguish what you have been told from what you know from experience. She narrates, as if she knew them firsthand, events from very early childhood and the first stages of her education -- neither of which she could possibly remember herself, at least not in such detail.

When Keller's book came out in 1903, she was criticized by one reviewer for her constant, un-self-conscious allusions to color and music. ''All her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,'' this critic wrote in The Nation, ''her very sensations are for the most part vicarious, and yet she writes of things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.'

As a kid, I grew up confident that the best decisions were based on pure intellectual reasoning. If you couldn’t figure out what to do next, make two columns — pros and cons

I’d arrive somewhere after an act of violence and, from a wash of stunned or unfriendly faces, have to decide who to approach. Following my gut, I’d find myself inexplicably drawn to the one with an amazing story held right behind his compressed lips, and a willingness to talk

Without conscious thought, I’d hit reverse, choose another street and find out later the switch had kept me safe.

The term "synesthesia" comes from the Greek words syn, which means "together", and aisthesis, which means "sensation." Synesthesia is a perception in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway  causes experiences in another sense or cognitive pathway. In other words, a sense or concept is connected to a different sense or concept, such as hearing a color or tasting a word. The connection between pathways is involuntary and consistent over time, rather than conscious or arbitrary.

Types of SynesthesiaThere are many different types of synesthesia, but they may be categorized as falling into one of two groups: associative synesthesia and projective synesthesia. An associate feels a connection between a stimulus and a sense, w

There are at least 80 known types of synesthesia, but some are more common than others: Chromesthesia: In this common form of synesthesia, sounds and colors are associated with each other. For example, the musical note "D" may correspond to seeing the color green.Grapheme-color synesthesia: This is a common form of synesthesia characterized by seeing graphemes (letter or numerals) shaded with a color. Synesthetes don't associate the same colors for a grapheme as each other, although the letter "A" does appear to be red to many individuals. Persons who experience grapheme-color synesthesia sometimes report seeing impossible colors when red and green or blue and yellow graphemes appear next to each other in a word or number. Number form: A number form is a mental shape or map of numbers resulting from seeing or thinking about numbers.Lexical-gustatory synesthesia: This a rare type of synesthesia in which hearing a word results in tasting a flavor. For example, a person's name might taste like chocolate.Mirror-touch synesthesia: While rare, mirror-touch synesthesia is noteworthy because it can be disruptive to a synesthete's life. In this form of synesthesia, an individual feels the same sensation in response to a stimulus as another person. For example, seeing a person being tapped on the shoulder would cause the synesthete to feel a tap on

We are learning a lot right now about the neuroscience of emotions. Specifically, we are learning that there is a lot of overlap between the way we process physical pain and the way we process emotional pain.

Understanding emotional pain could be powerful in understanding a lot of the common emotional maladies that are regularly treated with psychotherapy or mood altering medications. Depression, anxiety, trauma, social pain, these are all debilitating disorders that are poorly understood and often poorly treated.

Humans are a unique species in two ways that account for our intense response to social rejection. We are born physically immature because of our enormous heads, and we require a lot of care early on. Because of our immaturity at birth, our species has selected for a deeply innate sense of bonding between individuals. The other unique feature of our species is that we require a lot of calories, probably also due to our oversized brains. Brains are calorie intensive organs and our brains are huge. So, humans burn about 400 more calories per day than other primates when you account for size [2]. Since we burn so much food, we as a species, have an innate drive to share food, which may have allowed us to get through bad hunting or gathering days in early human history. So, humans are naturally drawn to bond with others and to be conscious of aligning with a group of people where food sharing is possible.

This process can be conscious, as in the soccer example, or unconscious, so that we are not even aware we are doing it. Using technology that tracks eye movements, cognitive scientists at MIT have now obtained the first direct evidence that people unconsciously use counterfactual simulation to imagine how a situation could have played out differently.

“What’s really cool about eye tracking is it lets you see things that you’re not consciously aware of,” Tenenbaum says. “When psychologists and philosophers have proposed the idea of counterfactual simulation, they haven’t necessarily meant that you do this consciously. It’s something going on behind the surface, and eye tracking is able to reveal that.”

“It’s in the close cases where you see the most counterfactual looks. They’re using those looks to resolve the uncertainty,” Tenenbaum says.

There is good evidence a midlife decline in life satisfaction is real. Population surveys typically find both women and men report the lowest satisfaction in middle age. The Australian HILDA survey locates the lowest life satisfaction at age 45, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics singles out the 45-54 age bracket as the glummest.

Middle age may be dislocating for some but there is little evidence it is usually a period of crisis and despondency. Psychologically speaking, things tend to get better. If there is a small dip in how people evaluate their lot -- even if it is objectively no worse than before -- this is understandable. Our attention shifts from time past to time left, and that requires a process of adjustment.

In one US study, one-third of people in their 70s defined themselves as middle-aged. This research accords with the finding middle-aged people tend to feel one decade younger than their birth certificate.

not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.

1. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day – not your fears or impulses.

We might not be conscious of how we interpret the world, because our beliefs are ingrained and habitual.

we can learn to bring our unconscious life philosophy to consciousness by asking ourselves questions.

That might sound incredibly simplistic and over-optimistic. Some philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists would argue that our capacity to choose a path in life is severely constrained by our genes, our childhood, our circumstances.

It makes sense; we all have a natural tendency to grow, transform, and live life as fully as we can. It is an internal drive to experience deeper fulfillment.

This “lack of self-worth” deeply buried idea about myself is just an example, there are numerous potential judgments, ideas, perceptions, assumptions, and feelings that I could be carrying in my own personal shadow.

The pain is due to the fact that there might be a reason behind the piece’s location in shadow of your psyche—it might be a threatening dimension of yourself, or a scary one, or one that is linked with some trauma or difficult past events—and you have pushed it into the unconscious so that you won't have to “meet” it as part of conscious awareness of yourself.

Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.

Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.