drmstream

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 […]

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 […]

Over at Pre­dictably Irra­tional, Dan Ariely uses Google’s search prompt to explore the dif­fer­ence between the ques­tions men are ask­ing about their girl­friends and women are ask­ing about their boyfriends. Look­ing at the top ques­tions, we can intuit some basic rela­tion­ship rules that will give peo­ple imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion. If you want to get a blowjob, […]

via tsutpen.blogspot.com The past unerr­ingly antic­i­pates the future. The form fac­tor is just dif­fer­ent. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

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.

Just how bound up nat­ural beauty is with art beauty is con­firmed by the expe­ri­ence of the for­mer. For it, nature is exclu­sively appear­ance, never the stuff of labor and the repro­duc­tion of life, let alone the sub-stratum of sci­ence. Like the expe­ri­ence of art, the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence is that of images. Nature, as appearing […]

via mjperry.blogspot.com More peo­ple, liv­ing longer, con­sum­ing more resources, increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion, dri­ves inno­va­tion. I look back over my life­time and believe that the sin­gle biggest force of change has been the growth of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion from 150 mil­lion to 300 mil­lion and the global pop­u­la­tion from about 3 bil­lion to 7 bil­lion. One major […]

Seed Mag­a­zine has a post elab­o­rat­ing on the phe­nom­e­non of the uncanny val­ley, and con­nect­ing the writ­ing of Freud and the gen­e­sis of the con­cept of the uncanny val­ley from Masahiro Mori with the recent work from Asif Ghaz­an­far. The hypoth­e­siz­ing about the uncanny value has focused on the premise of human­ness, the essence of […]

I have looked in a mir­ror and won­dered who that is. I’ve caught a glimpse of a man­nequin as I’ve turned a cor­ner on a dark, wet night and felt uneasy. This is the val­ley effect. The object looks too real but is too flawed. It is encroach­ing on the space of human­ness. The discomfort […]