there was absolutely no scientific research on this emotion

I was beginning to see connections between experiences as varied as falling in love, watching a sunset from a hilltop, singing in a church choir, and reading about a virtuous person. In all cases there's a change to the self -- a kind of opening to our higher, nobler possibilities.

"self-transcendent emotions,"

religions are often quite skilled at producing such feelings

Some religions build awe-inspiring buildings; most tell morally elevating stories.

I wanted to shift attention away from that aspect of religion onto the more emotional and social aspects.

Whether or not you believe in God, religions accomplish something miraculous: They turn large numbers of people who are not kin into a group that is able to work together, trust each other, and help each other.

"We believe the tools we are developing will exponentially increase the involvement of the Indigenous people whose languages are threatened, without the need for difficult-to-attain levels of computer literacy,"

Until now endangered aboriginal languages were recorded in the presence of a linguist and selected native speakers with recording equipment

indigenous people whose languages are threatened can record and upload languages at their own pace and at times which suit them, he says, without requiring the presence of a specialist holding a microphone

"The ability provided by the tools we are developing to easily create, record and share language, images, and video, at the same time as building sustainable databases for future use, involves and empowers speakers of indigenous languages in a way which has not been possible before."

"The earlier they're introduced to a second language, the easier it will be for them to pick it up." Knowing a second (or third!) language could one day give your child an edge in an increasingly global workforce.

tend to have superior reading and writing skills in both languages, as well as better analytical and academic skills,

"Learning a language is a question of repeated high-quality exposure,"

"If a family reads a book to their child in Spanish as part of a bedtime routine, that's a lot of reading and a lot of learning over an extended period of time."

What you can expect: Results range from recognizing the language when it's spoken to being able to converse casually. The more time the child spends with the nanny or in bilingual daycare, the greater the proficiency. "It all depends on the amount and quality of the child's exposure,"

What you can expect: A bilingual tot, in time. Don't worry if he doesn't speak either language as adeptly as his monolingual peers at first. If your child is exposed to both languages the same amount, he will be able to speak both equally well by the time he goes to school.

eating a balanced diet may be beneficial to reduce your risk of cognitive decline

there are many aspects of diet in combination with engaging in a healthy lifestyle that may influence cognitive decline

Participants were tested for their thinking and memory skills, at the start of the study, then again after two and five years.

"healthy diet" as one containing lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts, fish, moderate alcohol use and minimal red meat

"We just wanted to look at a diverse cohort of people from all around the world and analyze what their risk for cognitive decline would be if they consumed what most organizations would consider a 'healthy diet',"

this new study suggests that improving overall diet quality is an important factor for lowering the risk of memory and thinking loss

participants with the healthiest diets were 24% less likely to experience cognitive decline compared to those with the least healthy diets. These individuals were slightly older in age, more active, less likely to smoke and had a lower BMI.

blueberries may boost memory, and that a high intake of saturated and trans fats can have negative effects

But as good as animals are at detecting motion, they can also be fooled.

Visual movement can be thought of as a change in brightness, or luminance, over space and time

Why does the visual system treat this jumping dot as a single object in motion, instead of seeing one spot disappear while an unrelated spot appears nearby at the same instant? First, the brain usually treats “suspicious coincidences” as being more than coincidences: it is more likely that this is a single spot in motion rather than two separate events. Second, the visual system is tolerant of brief gaps in stimuli, filling in those gaps when necessary. This perception of apparent motion is, of course, the basis of the entire movie and TV industries, as viewers see a smooth motion picture when in reality they are simply watching a series of stationary stills.

movement in the nervous system created memories

memories are the encoding of experiences on webs of neurons in the brain

memory involved molecular changes via neurotransmitters in the brain

the neuron cell bodies themselves have some connection to the memory and control over the development and sustainment of synapses.

“Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse,”

part of memory is stored within the cells (neurons) themselves, and that they are using this memory storage to determine how many synapses to form and where.

Long-term memory is a function of the growth of new synaptic connections caused by the serotonin

As long-term memories are formed, the brain creates new proteins that are involved in making new synapses. If that process is disrupted — for example by a concussion or other injury — the proteins may not be synthesized and long-term memories cannot form. This is why people cannot remember what happened moments before a concussion.

Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)

The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media.

“In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,”

The result: reassurance and relief. Everything was in the normal range for her age, and she registered as superior on the ability to perform tasks and solve problems.

Simple tests done in eight to 12 minutes in a doctor’s office can determine whether memory issues are normal for one’s age or are problematic and warrant a more thorough evaluation.

more than half of older adults with signs of memory loss never see a doctor about it

“Early evaluation and identification of people with dementia may help them receive care earlier,”

“It can help families make plans for care, help with day-to-day tasks, including medication administration, and watch for future problems that can occur.”

Both tests measure orientation to time, date and place; attention and concentration; ability to calculate; memory; language; and conceptual thinking.

its score can be skewed by a person’s level of education, cultural background, a learning or speech disorder, and language fluency

software to identify consumers’ moods

this assumption is wrong

human facial expressions, viewed on their own, are not universally understood

look at photographs of facial expressions (smiling, scowling and so on) and match them to a limited set of emotion words (happiness, anger and so on) or to stories with phrases like “Her husband recently died.” Most subjects, even those from faraway cultures with little contact with Western civilization, were extremely good at this task, successfully matching the photos most of the time.

this research method was flawed

with a preselected set of emotion words, these experiments had inadvertently “primed” the subjects — in effect, hinting at the answers — and thus skewed the results

asked to freely describe the emotion on a face (or to view two faces and answer yes or no as to whether they expressed the same emotion). The subjects’ performance plummeted

the human ability to remember colors over any period of time, or even from room to room, is extremely poor.

“Based on memory alone, we can probably reliably identify tens of colors, with some people perhaps able to study hard and get up to a hundred or so,

Almost everyone can distinguish tones when they are compared in close succession, he said, but only a very small percentage of people have what is called perfect pitch or absolute pitch: the ability to recall and identify tones after a considerable period of time, without a reference tone for comparison.

we don’t speak of anyone as having perfect hue.”

“we can identify the tones in a chord, but we cannot identify the wavelength makeup of a color.”

chemical communication between humans in laboratory experiments

Whether pheromones play a role in human life outside the lab remains unknown. In animals pheromones affect the whole panoply of behavior - mating, aggression and fear.

rats that fear change have shorter lives than their more flexible counterparts, and that social isolation can also affect the longevity of rodents

the social and psychological world changes the fundamental mechanisms of biology, and vice versa

I've tried to situate biology in a rich social and psychological context and make it simple.

the chemosignal. Molecules produced by a person or animal that can change behaviors of others, even though they are not detected as an odor.

for two months, we exposed nonlactating women to this breast-feeding compound, which is found naturally in nursing mothers and infants. Women with regular sex partners reported a 24 percent increase in sexual desire; those without partners increased their sexual fantasies by 17 percent

the sociologist William H. Whyte

The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.

affected people’s enjoyment of a public space

We could make people happier.

Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?

Project for Public Spaces

time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.

studies how digital technology changes our lives

What’s the most important element in shaping the college experience?

who meets whom, and when

So what should students do to get more out of college?

As a freshman, live in one of the old-fashioned dorms with the long hallways, multiple roommates and communal bathroom, where you’ll have to bump into a lot of different people every day.

In choosing classes, pick the teacher over the topic.

Try to get to know a lot of people your first year, when everyone is looking for friends.

It helps to join a large high-contact activity, like a sports team or choir

it only takes two or three close friends and one or two great professors to have a fulfilling college experience

should students take as many small classes as they can get into?

Small classes are great. But most colleges also have some wonderful very large classes

What should colleges do to make students’ experiences better?

things that give the biggest payoff for the least effort

What do colleges do that doesn’t improve the experience?

Strategic plans.

Why do our money conversations swing from the expected — logical — to the unexpected — emotional?

Money conversations are rarely about the actual numbers.

We aren’t really talking about the numbers. We’re talking about the fact that money lined up so neatly on a page is supposed to represent our dreams and goals. Dreams and goals aren’t meant to fit on a spreadsheet, so conversations involving what matters to us are not about logic. They are most definitely about how we feel.

For better or worse, there’s often emotion behind those numbers. But because we aren’t expecting it, the emotion trips us up, causing all sorts of issues.

The goal was to track the relationship between financial worries and physical health.

arguing about money is a “top predictor” of divorce.

We react. We feel stress. I doubt we spend much time comforting ourselves with how neatly the numbers line up in our statements or paychecks.

we may spend a lot of time talking about other people’s money

we still aren’t comfortable talking about our money

adage that we shouldn’t talk about money at all. It’s rude in some way. But again, if it really is about numbers, then what’s the problem?

If money conversations aren’t about the numbers, then they are about how money makes us feel.

potential connection between money and health. If money were really about the numbers, then we would be able to logically process stock market dips or cuts to our paychecks.

It seems like it should be easy to talk about money with someone we love and trust. But if we’re honest, it’s rarely easy to have those money conversations with our partners, especially if we don’t acknowledge what’s driving those discussions.

what would happen to our money conversations if we acknowledged the role of emotion from the beginning? How would our conversations change if we recognized the disconnect between money, logic and emotion?

How much of this kind of reality can the public take? Producers clearly see no end in sight, and the results are increasingly becoming more questionable.

This is what's called a ''reality-based'' series, a label that has less to do with reality than comforting formula. The cameras do not go to a real hospital. But three real doctors are on the production staff.

''What you are about to see is real,'' we were told once again.

''On Trial'' opens with an announcer exclaiming that viewers are about to see ''Real people! Real Cases! Real Life!'' Mr. Clooney, a distinguished-looking fellow, fills in the pertinent facts.

His life shattered, he now has the dubious pleasure of knowing that, for some 20 minutes, he was the star of a television reality entertainment.

Everything is designed, they say, to ''give the show its docudrama look.'' The show's regular staff of three doctors are depicted by actors.

Needless to say, medical problems and crises have long been popular on television, especially on soap operas. ''Family Medical Center'' merely dispenses with extraneous plot and character developments and goes right to the medical core. A press release is candid about the show's interpretation of reality: ''It will have suspense, conflict and a resolution, which in almost all cases will be a happy one.''

The show looks as real as television entertainment can possibly make it. Alert viewers, however, will note whizzing by in the final credits the following advisory: '' 'Family Medical Center' is a dramatization. The characters are fictional and bear no resemblance to persons living or dead.''

Television reality wears many masks. A key to the overall picture was provided by one of those actors who deceived Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera with false impersonations on air. Why not, he shrugged, it's all entertainment. Frightening but not beyond comprehension.

Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life

But the new findings, which are described in detail in a paper this week in the journal Science, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane, placing an upper limit of 1.3 parts per billion by volume.

pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare, sometimes fatally so

It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant.