1857 lithograph by Armand Gautier, showing personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotic mania and paralysis in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. In an attempt to catalog madness, the artist has created a zoo exhibit for lunacy. They are curious objects, these women who have lost their mind with [...]
Do you have things that you think you remember, that you should remember, but that you don’t really know? When you open yourself to these images, they hang immaterial and alluring. Science has taught us that when we imagine remember or dream of doing something, or seeing a thing or hearing a sound, mirror neurons [...]
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 [...]
Erudite and thickly-written essay in The Chronicle Of Higher Education by David Barash speaking to the need of “a general theory of individuality.” It’s back to the theory of self for us. In part, the resistance encountered by human sociobiology, Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ultimate” interpretations [...]
B.F. Skinner invented a controlled environment designed to give infants and newborns more indepence; it was commonly known as Baby in a Box.
Last night I made a start at writing this down, then faltered when I saw how late it was, realized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and questioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to anywhere. This morning I got out [...]
The overcrowded mind can lead to an unsettled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my techniques for quieting my mind. I let my consciousness float, drift into an undefined space that suspends the forward momentum of thought, quiets down the chatter and waits for a structure to form. Even as I wait the [...]
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 [...]
Frequent and substantial conversations with others creates a sense of well-being, according to a psychology study reported in Science Daily this morning. Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others: The happiest participants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest participants. In [...]