Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time - Scientific American - 0 views
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Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances.
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In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear. When one sense drops out, another can pick up the slack.
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People with synesthesia have a particularly curious cross wiring of the senses, in which activating one sense spontaneously triggers another.
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Sensory perception | Science Features | Naked Scientists - 0 views
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Deciphering how the brain processes sight and hearing could have implications for how we understand and treat conditions such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia.
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schizophrenia
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Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.By doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe.
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The Thread Vibes Are Off - by Anne Helen Petersen - 0 views
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The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories
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Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.
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People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”
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How Do We Learn Languages? | Brain Blogger - 0 views
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The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.
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human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.
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Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.
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The Psychology of Scary Movies | FilmmakerIQ.com - 0 views
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This may explain the shape of our movie monsters: creatures with sharp teeth or snake like appearance.
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scary movies don’t actually activate fear responses in the amygdala at all. Instead, it was other parts of the brain that were firing – the visual cortex – the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, the insular cortex- self awareness, the thalamus -the relay switch between brain hemispheres, and the dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain associated with planning, attention, and problem solving.
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Unfortunately for Aristotle, research has shown the opposite – watching violence actually makes people MORE aggressive.
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I found this very interesting as it went deep into the psychology behind the horror movies. It's especially astonishing for me to see that horror movies don't actually activate fear responses, instead they stimulate the prefrontal cortex of our brain. Also, this article provides a lot of possibilities why we are so attracted to horror movies. I think this can be related to our perceptions and logic of survival since horror movie can help us return to the most primitive state(trembling in the woods) feel the impulse of wild. --Sissi (11/14/2016)
How Social Isolation Is Killing Us - The New York Times - 0 views
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About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health — especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression — are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters.
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Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.
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The loneliness of older adults has different roots — often resulting from family members moving away and close friends passing away. As one senior put it, “Your world dies before you do.”
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We are always finding reasons to do something good for others. However, these barriers are just invented. We don't need reason to be kind and friendly. The digital age gives us access to more people, but it also limits attention and effort to form a friendship. Our brain is limited so there is attention blindness showing that we cannot handle too much information. What we should do is focus our attention on people in our community and actually make effort to form relationships and connections. Usually, people that's most realistic and close to us are not online. --Sissi (12/23/2016)
ThinkUp Helps the Social Network User See the Online Self - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom.
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after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks.
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Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways.
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How 'Empowerment' Became Something for Women to Buy - The New York Times - 0 views
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The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.
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Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.
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Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.
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6 Humans With Real "Superpowers" That Science Can't Explain - Collective Evolution - 0 views
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was responsible for holding a number of sessions to test the validity of psychokinesis (moving objects with the mind). In these sessions, attendees were taught how to initiate their own PK events using various metal objects. Individuals were able to completely bend or contort their metal specimens with no physical force being applied whatsoever
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great example of something we can never definitively prove or refute because of so many possible variables. how are we to synthesize a full understanding of all of our human inputs: for example, visual paredoilia, confirmation bias, a magic trick, or an actual genetic mutation ?? We do not know if sci-fi will become scientific reality. We do not even know what we don't know Evie K (3/4/17)
The Benefits of 'Binocularity' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Will advances in neuroscience move reasonable people to abandon the idea that criminals deserve to be punished?
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if the idea of deserving punishment depends upon the idea that criminals freely choose their actions, and if neuroscience reveals that free choice is an illusion, then we can see that the idea of deserving punishment is nonsense
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“new neuroscience will undermine people’s common sense, libertarian conception of free will and the retributivist thinking that depends on it, both of which have heretofore been shielded by the inaccessibility of sophisticated thinking about the mind and its neural basis.”
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Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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New particles may yet be discovered, and even new laws. But it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.
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What makes “Mind and Cosmos” worth reading is that Dr. Nagel is an atheist, who rejects the creationist idea of an intelligent designer. The answers, he believes, may still be found through science, but only by expanding it further than it may be willing to go.
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“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning,” he wrote, “but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”
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Love People, Not Pleasure - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness
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Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites.
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Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.Continue reading the main story
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Rachel Dolezal's Unintended Gift to America - The New York Times - 0 views
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It is most unfortunate that Ms. Dolezal did not begin her television interviews on Tuesday by acknowledging that she should not have claimed to be black. She might have been forgiven if she had stated clearly that, while she may identify herself as black, by American society’s standards, her racial designation is white.
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Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.
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Identities are never entirely our own, but does that mean that we should lose all control in determining who we are? Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love - The New York Times - 0 views
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Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.
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There are many well-rehearsed reasons for the change: the rise of television followed by the triumph of digital technology, the sending of instant messages instead of letters, the ‘‘visual turn’’ in our culture, the pervasive use of social media. In their wake, the whole notion of a linguistic birthright could be called quaint, the artifact of particular circumstances that have now vanished
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For my parents, born in Boston, the English language was a treasured sign of arrival and rootedness; for me, a mastery of Shakespeare, the supreme master of that language, was like a purchased coat of arms, a title of gentility tracing me back to Stratford-upon-Avon.
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Films For Action - 0 views
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"Brandalism is a revolt against corporate control of the visual realm. It is the biggest anti-advertising campaign in world history and it's getting bigger. Starting in July 2012 with a small team in a van, Brandalism has grown tenfold to include teams in 10 UK cities skilled up in taking back space. This film covers the Brandalism takeover in May 2014 which saw the reclamation of over 360 corporate advertising spaces with hand made original art works submitted by 40 international artists."
A Message From Your Brain: I'm Not Good At Remembering What I Hear - 0 views
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comparing how well we recall something, depending on whether we see it, hear it, or touch it.
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"Our auditory memory isn't as robust as we might like to think it is," says Poremba. "We think that we are great at integrating all the senses," but the experiment shows that tactile and visual memory easily trumped auditory memory.
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Indeed, the study is a reminder that we need to engage all the senses "to promote learning and memory," says Janet Brain, a learning disabilities specialist in New York. That approach is already "the hallmark of much of the reading instruction that's done with dyslexic children."
Straight Talk for White Men - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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SUPERMARKET shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
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Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
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Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
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Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain's Subconscious Visual Sense - The New York Times - 0 views
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Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina
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Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina
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project not only to the visual cortex
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Trump Is Expected to Sign Orders That Could Expand Access to Fossil Fuels - The New Yor... - 0 views
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After moving last month against Barack Obama’s efforts to limit fossil fuel exploration and combat climate change, President Trump will complete his effort to overturn environmental policy this week, signing two executive orders to expand offshore drilling and roll back conservation on public lands.
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The president is then expected to follow up on Friday with another executive order aimed at opening up protected waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to offshore drilling.
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Friday’s order is also expected to call for the lifting of a permanent ban on drilling in an area including many of those same waters — a measure Mr. Obama issued in December 2016 in a last-ditch effort to protect his environmental legacy from his drilling-enthusiast successor.
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We are not listening to the professionals about climate change. People will most likely look back at this history and blame us for the future of the environment if we don't work now to fix it. If these plans eventually go through, the climate will be much harder to fix, and this is part of the problem we will have to deal with.
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