At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–1294) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned. Since his messengers returned with information from different distances and traveled at different rates (depending on weather, conflicts, and their fitness), the messages arrived at different times. Although no historians have addressed this issue, I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what events in the empire occurred in which order?

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere.

{ David M. Eagleman/Edge | Continue reading }

photos { Henri Cartier-Bresson | Ruben Natal-San Miguel }

‘Your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.’ –Warhol. I like that.

Wish I was back in school so I could do a thesis on how things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc are technology’s attempt to ’solve’ this problem, effectively making us nostalgic for the present as we advertise it, not live it.

{ Colleen Nika }

photo { Becky Ninkovic }

Is male libido the ultimate cause of war?

Across four experiments Lei Chang and his team showed that pictures of attractive women or women’s legs had a raft of war-relevant effects on heterosexual male participants, including: biasing their judgments to be more bellicose towards hostile countries; speeding their ability to locate an armed soldier on a computer screen; and speeding their ability to recognise and locate war-related words on a computer screen.

Equivalent effects after looking at pictures of attractive men were not found for female participants.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

{ 1 | 2 }

Why masturbation helps procreation

Evidence from elephants to rodents to humans shows that masturbating is—counterintuitively—an excellent way to make healthy babies, and lots of them. (…)

There are four basic theories. (…)

1. Masturbation might remove old, worn-out, broken sperm from the reproductive tract.

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

Four and three and two and one, what up! And when I’m on the mic, the suckers run (Word!)

{ Beastie Boys, The New Style, 1986 | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2. Magic Rays May Signal New Laws of the Universe }

Sleeping Beauty goes into an isolated room on Sunday and falls asleep. Monday she awakes, and then sleeps again Monday night. A fair coin is tossed, and if it comes up heads then Monday night Beauty is drugged so that she doesn’t wake again until Wednesday. If the coin comes up tails, then Monday night she is drugged so that she forgets everything that happened Monday – she wakes Tuesday and then sleeps again Tuesday night. When Beauty awakes in the room, she only knows it is either heads and Monday, tails and Monday, or tails and Tuesday. Heads and Tuesday is excluded by assumption. The key question: what probability should Beauty assign to heads when she awakes?

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Man Ray, Solarization, 1929 }

Although it might be called a form of lying, most societies have highly valued storytelling. (…)

If “magic” is the creation of subjective realities in the minds of other peoples, then we moderns have learned how to perform magical incantations on a vast, industrial scale.

And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated “virtual” realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren’t living in—or even existing because of—a simulation?

{ David Brin/IEET | Continue reading }

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?

Of course, the answer depends on how we choose to interpret the use of the word ‘sound’. (…)

Here the word ‘sound’ is used to describe a physical phenomenon –- the wave disturbance. But sound is also a human experience, the result of physical signals delivered by human sense organs which are synthesized in the mind as a form of perception.

Now, to a large extent, we can interpret the actions of human sense organs in much the same way we interpret mechanical measuring devices. The human auditory apparatus simply translates one set of physical phenomena into another, leading eventually to stimulation of those parts of the brain cortex responsible for the perception of sound. It is here that the distinction comes. Everything to this point is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, but the process by which we turn electrical signals in the brain into human perception and experience in the mind remains, at present, unfathomable.

Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all.

This business about the distinction between ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘things-as-they-appear’ has troubled philosophers for as long as the subject has existed, but what does it have to do with modern physics, specifically the story of quantum theory? In fact, such questions have dogged the theory almost from the moment of its inception in the 1920s.

{ OUP | Continue reading }

photo { Walter Pickering }

Belief in a causal loop between the stomach and the mind never disappeared. (…) In the 1880s, Nietzsche diagnosed the whole Western philosophical tradition as a case of indigestion.

{ Review of A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950 by Ian Miller | London Review of Books | Continue reading }

{ Charlie Crane }

Take a look at your hands. In them, you find atoms that once belonged to stars dead more than five billion years ago. Those stars, bigger than our sun, forged much of the chemistry of life during their last moments, before exploding into giant supernovae. They forged chemical elements spread through the interstellar medium, collecting here and there in self-gravitating hydrogen clouds. Occasionally, these clouds would become unstable to their own gravity and contract. These contracting nebulae gave rise to stars and their orbiting planets, trillions of them in our Milky Way alone.

In at least one of them, elements combined in incredibly complex ways to create living creatures. And of these myriad beings, one developed mind, the ability to sustain complex thoughts and to wonder about its origins.

We are, in a very real sense, self-aware stardust. (…)

There are many gaps to fill in this cosmic narrative, and this is what makes science exciting. As we thrust ahead, we learn more about the universe and our place in it. Perhaps one of the most controversial questions that follows from this discussion concerns our inevitability. Is our existence an inevitable consequence of the laws of Nature? Or are we an accident, and the cosmos could equally well exist without us?

{ Marcelo Gleiser | Continue reading }

Songs sound less sad when you’re older

Music is a powerful tool of expressing and inducing emotions. Lima and colleagues aimed at investigating whether and how emotion recognition in music changes as a function of ageing. Their study revealed that older participants showed decreased responses to music expressing negative emotions, while their perception of happy emotions remained stable.

{ Nou Stuff | Continue reading }

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By those standards, the deal with Greece that is about to be agreed looks insane. The only justification is that it is needed to play for time. This is a bad strategy. Something more radical is required.

The question about the prospects for Greece is not whether the country will default. That is, in my view, as near to a certainty as any such thing can be. The question is whether a default would be enough to return the economy to reasonable health. I strongly doubt it. The country seems too uncompetitive for that. A default is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a return to economic health.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

painting { Andrew Wyeth, Wind From the Sea, 1947 }

Where does psychological health end and mental illness begin? (…)

We are in the midst of a mental illness epidemic. Office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped forty-fold from 1994 to 2003. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly half of all Americans have suffered from mental illness—depression, anxiety, even psychosis—at some time in their lives. Is one out of every two Americans mentally ill, or could it be that the system of psychiatric diagnosis too often mistakes the emotional problems of everyday life for psychopathology?

This system is codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. Now in its fourth edition, the psychiatric bible, as it is sometimes called, spells out the criteria for over 360 different diagnoses. The DSM serves as the basic text for training practitioners, for insurance companies who rely on it to determine coverage, for social service agencies who use it to assess disabilities, and for the courts, which turn to it to resolve questions of criminal culpability, competence to stand trial, and insanity.

Despite the vast influence of DSM and the best efforts of its architects, the manual has failed to clear up the murky border between health and sickness.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

The ad industry is quickly evolving into a new industry - one that won’t offer only the limited menu of services that’s attributed to it today. I’m not sure if this new industry should even be called advertising anymore, as the term itself can be an albatross to innovation. But whatever the name is, it’ll be even more exciting and productive than in its current incarnation.

When I invented the 4th Amendment Wear brand for my consultancy, I didn’t realize at the time that it would teach me such an important lesson about where we’re headed. (…)

It’s one thing to create an ad. It’s a whole other beast to invent new technology, create products using that technology, tap into social media, and orchestrate a marketing campaign to reach millions. (…)

While much of 4th Amendment Wear’s success can be attributed to the brand being in the right place at the right time, the truth is, all brands need to be.

{ Tim Geoghegan | Continue reading | 4th Amendment Wear picked up the Gold lion for Promo & Activation at Cannes. }

Heineken Star Player… (…) Whether this piece of work gets recognized at Cannes this week or not is not relevant or even important. What’s important is that it wasn’t the regular copywriter + art director duo who came up with the Idea. It was a combination of a Storyteller and a Software Developer who conceived it.

{ Rei Inamoto | Continue reading }

Look at eggs. Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work—it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

But should we call this progress? In a sense it sounds like a deal with the devil. Replace workers with machines in the name of lower costs. Profits rise. Repeat. It’s a wonder unemployment is only 9.1%. Shouldn’t the economy put people ahead of profits?

Well, it does. The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don’t always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

The result is a higher standard of living for consumers. (…)

Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Long before we communicated with language, we communicated with our bodies, especially our faces. Everyone knows we ‘talk’ with facial expressions, but do we ‘hear’ ourselves with them?

{ Thoughts on Thoughts | Continue reading }

The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each emulating human responses. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2. Trisha Donnelly }