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One important fact is that the brain works in some ways like television transmission, in that it processes stable backgrounds without much attention and moving parts more intensely and differently.

Recent research in babies shows that they respond most to unexpected events and use these to evaluate the environment and learn.

But, the over arching analysis of visual signals depends on what is expected.

There is no conventional “narrative” to Fortnite Battle Royale – Epic doesn’t provide an origin story for its endless 100-player wars, it doesn’t give us long cinematic scenes with characters explaining the world, the factions and the plot. Instead, Fortnite is split into a series of three-month-long seasons, each with a climactic event that suggests some kind of interdimensional struggle taking place over the future of the game’s isolated island locale.

Ostensibly, there’s no need for a narrative – Epic could, in theory, retain player interest simply by making sure there is a steady supply of new dance moves, costumes and scenic features to enjoy. Instead, the studio has built a vast functional universe in which an alien known as The Visitor is attempting to mend the space-time fissure around the island, and communicated this through systems of signs, signals and miracles – sort of like the Medieval Christian church

Indeed, it’s interesting how Fortnite has co-opted a lot of religious symbolism into the game’s suggestive narrative, from comets trailing across the sky, to the decidedly apocalyptic imagery of fire, brimstone and global destruction.

With people around the world practicing social distancing and self-isolation to curb the further spread of coronavirus, some are starting to feel the effects of a lack of human touch.

“Touch is the fundamental language of connection,” says Keltner. “When you think about a parent-child bond or two friends or romantic partners, a lot of the ways in which we connect and trust and collaborate are founded in touch.”

It’s not just about how we feel emotionally. Keltner adds that “touch deprivation” can impact people on a psychological and even physical level

you analyze fear as the emotion principally responsible for religious intolerance. You label fear the “narcissistic emotion.” But why think that the logic of fear—erring on the side of caution (“better to be safe than sorry”)—is narcissism rather than just good common sense, especially in an era of global terrorism and instability? MN: Biological and psychological research on fear shows that it is in some respects more primitive than other emotions, involving parts of the brain that do not deal in reflection and balancing. It also focuses narrowly on the person’s own survival, which is useful in evolutionary terms, but not so useful if one wants a good society. These tendencies to narrowness can be augmented, as I show in my book, through rhetorical manipulation. Fear is a major source of the denial of equal respect to others. Fear is sometimes appropriate, of course, and I give numerous examples of this. But its tendencies toward narrowness make it easily manipulable by false information and rhetorical hype.

DJ: In comparing fear and empathy, you say that empathy “has its own narcissism.” Do all emotions have their own forms of narcissism, and if so, why call fear "a narcissistic emotion"? MN: What I meant by my remarks about empathy is that empathy typically functions within a small circle, and is activated by vivid narratives, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown. So it is uneven and partial. But it is not primarily self-focused, as fear is. As John Stuart Mill said, fear tells us what we need to protect against for ourselves, and empathy helps us extend that protection to others.

MN: I think it’s OK to teach religious texts as literature, but better to teach them as history and social reality as part of learning what other people in one’s society believe and take seriously. I urge that all young people should get a rich and non-stereotypical understanding of all the major world religions. In the process, of course, the teacher must be aware of the multiplicity of interpretations and sects within each religion

as more Americans label the president a racist due to his worldview, the voters who continue to back him are becoming bolder in justifying their support, citing retaliation for being viewed as backing a racist.

as the president’s overall approval ratings remain relatively low, many of those who brought him to the dance appear to be dancing more closely than ever. And they are blaming their critics

After Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) tweeted the names of maximum Trump donors in his district — which are all public record, by the way — accusing them of “fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as invaders,” the backlash from Trump-supporting Republicans was severe.

recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.

“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 

To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

the profusion of “everything” spins the head. “This tiny pig dancing in the grass is everything.”

religiously and philosophically inclined take to Facebook and Tumblr to pronounce their dictums:

Everything” is a fudge, a word we apply to the unknowable.

Guards inside prisons shouldn't have guns. That's pretty much an accepted fact. Except in Nevada—and the results are mayhem and death.

“Neither could affect an effective offensive,” McNeill recalled. “It was like some awkward and quirky dance, then 'BOOM.'”

the same tiny pellets that sport shooters use to blow apart clay pigeons and that hunters use to kill birds and rabbits.

Live free or die: This is the maxim of our age. But the freedoms we celebrate are particular and limited. We fetishize the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite, in some cases because of, this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.

Half a century ago, we were promised that rising wealth would mean less work, longer vacations and more choice

our working hours rise in line with economic growth, and they are now governed by a corporate culture of snooping and quantification, of infantilizing dictats and impossible demands, all of which smothers autonomy and creativity. Technologies that promised to save time and free us from drudgery (such as email and smartphones) fill our heads with a clatter so persistent it stifles the ability to think.

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too.

We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.

he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.

If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.

Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions.

The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence

Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

As noted by meme database Know Your Meme, Trash Dove exploded in popularity after it was featured alongside a dancing cat on a Thai Facebook page with millions of followers

Pigeons are such strange birds, they have very beautiful mottled, shimmery feathers, but they waddle around and bob their heads and beg for crumbs. They’re like beautiful doves, except they eat trash.

The fan art and nice comments have been the highlight for me, but I’m amazed at how mean people can be to someone they’ve never met, because of something silly online.

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now — after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution — these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.

Egypt is running out of foreign reserves, its currency is falling, inflation is rising and unemployment is rampant. Yet the priority of a few retrograde Mubarak holdovers is to put on trial staffers from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are allied with the two main U.S. political parties, as well as from Freedom House and some European groups. Their crime was trying to teach Egypt’s young democrats how to monitor elections and start parties to engage in the very democratic processes that the Egyptian Army set up after Mubarak’s fall. Thousands of Egyptians had participated in their seminars in recent years.

It is the tendency to look for dignity in all the wrong places — to look for dignity not by building up the capacity of Egypt’s talented young people so they can thrive in the 21st century — with better schools, better institutions, export industries and more accountable government. No, it is the tendency to go for dignity on the cheap “by standing up to the foreigners.”