drmstream[writing]

Scene I The lights come up and reveal a grey, empty room.  Our per­spec­tive is at an angle; two walls retreat to the back of the stage and join in a cor­ner in the deep recesses of stage right. The lights dim.  Ocean sounds fill the air, the swell and wash of the water, a building […]

  When we read a story, our brains plot every­thing that’s going on, from the character’s phys­i­cal loca­tions in space to their inter­ac­tions with objects in the envi­ron­ment to their pur­suit of var­i­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tional goals.  Many of the brain areas active while read­ing are also active when we actu­ally take part in or […]

I, for one, wel­come my Nean­der­tal ances­try. It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 per­cent. But that’s the equiv­a­lent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA con­tri­bu­tion. In the case of the Nean­der­tal con­tri­bu­tion, more than 1500 gen­er­a­tions ago, it’s an endur­ing legacy of an ancient group of peo­ple, spread across many […]

The title’s only a lit­tle bit of an exag­ger­a­tion.  Accord­ing to research by Mark Changizi, sum­ma­rized in a great inter­view on Neu­ronar­ra­tive, what we see is our brain’s approx­i­ma­tion of the world in a tenth of a sec­ond, not the world at the instant that we see. Con­fused?  Here’s an excerpt from Changizi. When light hits […]

When my great-great-great grand­fa­ther William Can­dlish was born in Vir­ginia in 1804, there were 1 bil­lion peo­ple in the world. It had taken thou­sands of years for the world to reach that mile­stone of human sat­u­ra­tion. When my father was born in the 1930’s, the num­ber of peo­ple in the world had just passed the 2 […]

The things I couldn’t learn in school:  chem­istry, physics, other lan­guages.  These have become the things that are at the core of under­stand­ing. At one not-to-distant point in time, under­stand­ing human nature was the prove­nance of the human­i­ties, with some sprin­kling of the pseudo-science of anthro­pol­ogy sprin­kled in.  Con­text and com­par­i­son gave you the framework […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]

via bldgblog.blogspot.com Bios­phere 2 was a ill-conceived effort to recre­ate the earth’s ecosys­tem within an vast geo­desic dome, a kind of Earth-pod on the sur­face of Earth. Bldg­Blog is fea­tur­ing the pho­tos of Noah Shel­don, who recently vis­ited the defunct struc­ture and recorded nature’s steady creep. A dead build­ing, Bldg­Blog pro­claims. A dead build­ing is one […]

Be con­fi­dent in see­ing what is in front of you. From Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, a rebut­tal to the phe­nom­e­non of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, summed up in the equa­tion: H = S + C + V (Hap­pi­ness = your Set range + the Cir­cum­stances of your life + the fac­tors under your Vol­un­tary con­trol) “Human intel­lec­tual progress, such as […]

via neuronarrative.wordpress.com A the­ory that emo­tion is one of the ear­li­est attrib­utes that evolved in the genome. Emo­tion is, in fact, a rudi­men­tary sys­tem that we have to adapt to the more com­plex sys­tems, such as cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion, that have evolved to help assure the best pos­si­ble behav­iors for the prop­a­ga­tion of the species.