A fascinating paper asks what one man with no memory – and no regrets – can really teach us about time. […]
Researchers Carl Craver and colleagues describe the case of “KC”, a former “roadie for rock bands, prone to drinking and occasional rash behavior” who suffered extensive brain damage in a motorcycle crash. In particular, KC lost his hippocampus on both sides of the brain. This area is crucial for memory, so KC experiences profound amnesia. In fact, he’s one of the best known cases of the condition.
KC is unable to form any new long-term memories: he forgets everything that happens within a matter of minutes. He also, famously, cannot imagine anything happening in either the past or the future. Here’s a much-quoted conversation between him and neuroscientist Endel Tulving.
ET: What will you be doing tomorrow?
[15 second pause.]
KC: I don’t know.
{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }
photo { Archana Rayamajhi }
memory |
April 2nd, 2014
Wal-Mart sues Visa for $5 billion over card swipe fees
Gangs of ‘powerfully built’ black women are mugging tourists on the streets of Hong Kong. One luckless expatriate was picked up and thrown into a trash can.
Cell phone use is estimated to be involved in 26 percent of all motor vehicle crashes
Four in 10 infants lack strong parental attachments
Public smoking bans linked with rapid fall in preterm births and child hospital visits for asthma
Marinating meat in beer before grilling it can reduce the chances of producing harmful chemicals that can cause cancer
According to a new study, a couple of drinks makes you tell objectively funnier jokes. [Thanks Tim]
Scientists Create Synthetic Yeast Chromosome Man-made yeasts could irreversibly change everything from the biofuel to the brewing industry.
Farrenkopf had a bank account with a very large sum in it, and she had set up her mortgage and utility bills to be paid automatically from it. As her body decomposed in her garage, the funds went out regularly.
In 1982 a brutal triple homicide shook the city of Waco and soon became one of the most confounding criminal cases in Texas history [Part I to V]
Sweden is the largest exporter of pop music, per capita, in the world.
Censorship is free speech when search engines do it, a US court just ruled
I like doing sound portraits – I get close to someone’s face, I take down the sound of the hair, the sounds of the skin, eyes and lips, and then I create a specific chord that relates to the face. How Harbisson hears the colors that most people see
3-D Printed Skull Successfully Implanted In Woman
Five Health Benefits of Standing Desks
Grills, ‘Grillz’ and dental hygiene implications
I’ve put my heartbeat on the internet.
The Jewish-Japanese Sex & Cook Book and How to Raise Wolves
Embroidered Cat Shirts By Hiroko Kubota [Thanks Tim]
His animals get their energy from the wind so they don’t have to eat. [Wikipedia]
Instant architect
every day the same again |
March 28th, 2014
Giving violators more punishment than they deserve can undermine the benefits of cooperative action. […] At the same time, imposing markedly less punishment than what a violator deserves creates disaffection and acrimony that also can subvert cooperation. In other words, it is not punishment that is needed to maintain social cooperation, but justice. […]
In 1848, the discovery of gold brought 300,000 men to California from all over the world. Yet this sudden mass of humanity lived without a functioning legal system. And if there had been a legal enforcement system, it was unclear what law it would enforce. […] Without a functional government, there were no licensing procedures, fees, or taxes to regulate gold prospecting. No miner worked land that he owned. Any prospector could join any mining camp at any time. Camp populations were heterogeneous: “Puritans and drunkards, clergymen and convict, honest and dishonest, rich and poor.” There was no common language, culture, or legal experience. […] The men shared a common set of needs, however. Each miner needed to be able to leave whatever he owned unguarded each day while he worked his claim. A miner who found gold needed to protect his find until he could convert it into cash or goods.
{ Paul H. Robinson/SSRN | Continue reading }
flashback, ideas, law |
March 28th, 2014
People often believe they have more control over outcomes (particularly positive outcomes) than they actually do. Psychologists discovered this illusion of control in controlled experiments. […] People suffering from depression tend not to fall for this illusion. That fact, along with similar findings from depression, gave rise to the term depressive realism. Two recent studies now suggest that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may also represent contingency and estimate personal control differently from the norm. […] Their obsessions cause them distress and they perform compulsions in an effort to regain some sense of control over their thoughts, fears, and anxieties. Yet in some cases, compulsions (like sports fans’ superstitions) seem to indicate an inflated sense of personal control. Based on this conventional model of OCD, you might predict that people with the illness will either underestimate or overestimate their personal control over events. So which did the studies find? In a word: both.
{ Garden of the Mind | Continue reading }
psychology |
March 28th, 2014
{ Traditional rug-making techniques meet contemporary political imagery | full story }
asia, economics, visual design |
March 27th, 2014
The exhibition that stands out for me is Horst Ademeit at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, 2011. In a small, often overlooked area of the museum was an overwhelming amount of meticulously ordered material by an artist I’d never heard of before. After being rejected by his parents, his wife, his school, and even his teacher – Joseph Beuys – Ademeit abandoned drawing and painting for photography and writing. He shot more than 6,000 Polaroids in isolation over a 14-year period, which engulfed the room.
In the margins of the Polaroids, and in seemingly endless calendars and booklets, he handwrote notations at a scale that borders on indecipherable. He was studying the impact of cold rays, earth rays, electromagnetic waves and other forms of radiation on his health and safety. He protected himself with magnets and herbs from what he perceived to be dangerous invisible forces, while obsessively creating this trove of records and evidence.
{ Taryn Simon/Guardian | Galerie SuSanne Zander }
photogs |
March 26th, 2014
new york |
March 25th, 2014
Miners earn newly minted bitcoins for adding new sections to the blockchain. But the amount awarded for adding a section is periodically halved so that the total number of bitcoins in circulation never exceeds 21 million (the reward last halved in 2012 and is set to do so again in 2016). Transaction fees paid to miners for helping verify transfers are supposed to make up for that loss of income. But fees are currently negligible, and the Princeton analysis predicts that under the existing rules these fees won’t become significant enough to make mining worth doing in the absence of freshly minted bitcoins.
{ Technology Review | Continue reading }
cryptocurrency, economics, technology |
March 24th, 2014
Horses are the only species other than man transported around the world for competition purposes.
In humans, transport across several time zones can result in adverse symptoms commonly referred to as jetlag.
Can changes in the light/dark cycle, equivalent to those caused by transport across several time zones, affect daily biological rhythms, and performance in equine athletes?
[…]
We found that horses do feel a change in the light/dark cycle very acutely, but they also recover very quickly, and this resulted in an improvement in their performance rather than a decrease in their performance, which was exactly the opposite of what we thought was going to happen.
{ HBLB | PDF }
horse, time |
March 24th, 2014
A recent paper has put a hole in another remnant of Freud’s influence, that suppressed memories are still active. Freud noticed that we can suppress unwelcome memories. He theorized that the suppressed memories continued to exist in the unconscious mind and could unconsciously affect behaviour. Uncovering these memories and their influence was a large part of psychoanalysis. Understanding whether this theory is valid is important for evaluating recovered memories of abuse and for dealing with post-traunatic stress disorder.
The question Gagnepain, Henson and Anderson set out to answer was whether successfully suppressed conscious memories were also suppressed unconsciously or whether they were still unconsciously active. […]
[T]he results do fit with a number of other findings about memory, so that it is now unwise to take the Freudian view of suppression as reliable.
{ Neuro-patch | Continue reading }
memory |
March 24th, 2014
Male movements serve as courtship signals in many animal species, and may honestly reflect the genotypic and/or phenotypic quality of the individual. Attractive human dance moves, particularly those of males, have been reported to show associations with measures of physical strength, prenatal androgenization and symmetry. […]
By using cutting-edge motion-capture technology, we have been able to precisely break down and analyse specific motion patterns in male dancing that seem to influence women’s perceptions of dance quality. We find that the variability and amplitude of movements in the central body regions (head, neck and trunk) and speed of the right knee movements are especially important in signalling dance quality.
{ Biology Letters | PDF }
dance, psychology |
March 22nd, 2014
At one end is our everyday consciousness, and at the other is total unconsciousness, as represented by coma. Actually, the term “coma” covers two very similar states: One is the kind of coma that results from a severe head injury or cardiac arrest, and the other is the state induced in a hospital setting by means of general anesthesia.
So anyone who has had general anesthesia has been in a coma?
Yes, general anesthesia is nearly identical to what we might call “natural” coma.
{ American Scientist | Continue reading }
brain, neurosciences |
March 22nd, 2014
The most striking finding of our study is that addition of milk to black tea completely prevents the biological activity of tea in terms of improvement of endothelial function. Our results thus provide a possible explanation for the lack of beneficial effects of tea on the risk of heart disease in the UK, where milk is usually added to tea.
{ European Heart Journal | PDF }
and { Happy people work harder (especially if they get chocolate) }
art { Barnett Newman, The Voice, 1950 }
food, drinks, restaurants, health |
March 21st, 2014
In a survey of more than 1,300 adults, 20% agreed with the theory that childhood vaccines cause autism. Far fewer believed that the U.S. government hatched a plot to infect African Americans with HIV. Overall, 49% agreed with at least one of the six conspiracy theories presented.
{ NY Daily News | Continue reading }
health |
March 21st, 2014
