Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—but only if it knows the first mouse. Monkeys, too, will feel bad for another monkey, but only if they’re on friendly terms. People also feel less empathy for those they dislike. But our species adds another layer of complication: We empathize more with people who are “like us” than with “them.” This study, published this month, suggests that this Us-Them divide is more general—that the brain responds differently to any action performed by “one of us,” not just to signs of trouble.

The study is part of a boom in research around the idea that people literally share feelings, at the physiological level: When I see you in pain, for example, neurons fire in my brain just as they would if I myself were in pain. It’s an intriguing notion, not least because it offers a way to integrate aspects of human behavior that are usually looked at separately. Empathy is a social fact, arising out of people’s relationships to each other; and it’s a psychological experience for each of us; and it’s a physiological phenomena in each empathizer’s body. A model that connects those different levels would offer a more complete explanation. It would also, of course, offer ways to corroborate theories: It’s great to be able to ask people if they feel empathy, but it’s even better if you can measure it as well.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

illustration { saimanchow }

A new scheme for making quantum money could lead to cash that cannot be counterfeited. But it may also lead to a new breed of quantum crime.

In the last couple of years, a number of quantum dignitaries have become interested in the (relatively) ancient problem of quantum money.

The challenge is to create a quantum state that can work as a form of money. Just like ordinary cash, quantum cash would be exchanged in lieu of goods. It would be sent and received over the internet without the need to involve third party parties such as banks and credit card companies. That would make transactions anonymous and difficult to trace, unlike today’s online transactions which always leave an electronic paper trail. That’s one big advantage over today’s money.

Another is that quantum states cannot be copied so quantum cash cannot be forged.

But quantum cash must have another property: anybody needs to be able to check that the money is authentic. That turns out to be hard because measurements on quantum states tend to destroy them. It’s like testing classical bills by seeing whether they burn.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Happier people tend to think about themselves with higher level of abstraction than less happy people, even after controlling for the overall valence and internality of their construals. … People randomly assigned to think about themselves in abstract rather than concrete terms reported greater pre- to post-manipulation increases in reports of life satisfaction.

{ via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading | Fortune favors the bold | Wikipedia }

in the beginning there was imp, and imp had a groove. and from this groove came the grooves of all grooves. and while one day viciously throwing down on her box, imp boldly declared, let there be house! and house music was born. i am, you see, i am the creator, and this is my house, and in my house there is only house music. but i am not so selfish, because once you’re into my house it then becomes our house and our house music. and you see, no one man owns house, because house music is a universal language spoken and understood by all. in every house, you understand, there is a keeper and in this house the keeper is imp. now, some of you might wonder, who is imp and what is it that imp does? imp is the one who gives you the power to imp your body. imp is the one who gives you the power to do the snake. imp is the one who gives you the key to the power disco. imp is the one that can bring nations and nations of all impers together under one house. you may be black, you may be white, you may be jew, or gentile. it doesn’t make a difference in our house.

{ Chuck Roberts, My House, 1987, edited by Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

{ Iamamiwhoami is the latest in intriguing mystery viral video phenomenon. … nine video music releases … Speculation has focused on artists such as Jonna Lee of Sweden,  Trent Reznor , Little Boots , The Knife , *especially Karin Dreijer Andersson , Goldfrapp, Lykke Li , Gwen Stefani , Madonna , Lady Gaga , & Immi. | Fierth | full story + videos }

The phenomenon of multiple personality presents a puzzle for our understanding and thinking about what it is to be a person, for in such cases we are left in doubt about where one person ends and another perhaps begins. In cases of multiple personality, our sense of personal identity and the continuity of the self seem to be shattered. The problem of personal identity consists in identifying those circumstances that comprise necessary and sufficient conditions for the continuity of the same self over time, such as spatio‑temporal continuity, continuity of long‑term memory traces, etc. As Apter (1991) puts it, the special problem attached to personal identity and multiple personality is the “Question of Who… Is a multiple personality the same person over time?”

{ Review of Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson, 2009 | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Abby Wilcox }

{ The Selvedge Yard | more | Thanks MZH! }

I woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I said to my roommate, ‘Can you believe this? Everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’

{ Steven Wright | NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Johan Willner }

SHOW by Henry Horenstein, published by Pond Press, features images of fetish, drag and neo-burlesque performers. Shot in underground clubs in Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, these intimate and clever black and white photos capture the pasties, fishnets and lipstick kisses of the superstars of neo-burlesque, including Dita Von Teese and Murray Hill.

{ Book Signing and Film Screening of Henry Horenstein’s SHOW, Tuesday, May 11th, 6-8 pm, Clic Gallery, 424 Broome St, NYC }

related { Clic will be presenting a special exhibit of Ron Galella’s most famous shots in June, to coincide with the HBO release of the documentary SMASH HIS CAMERA. }

Women in Paris may soon be allowed to wear trousers – which they have been technically banned from doing for 210 years.

Any woman in the capital that wishes to ‘dress like a man’ must obtain permission from the police, according to a law from 1800.

The law was relaxed slightly in 1892, when trousers were permitted ‘as long as the woman is holding the reins of a horse’.

{ Metro.co.uk | Continue reading }

photo { Emilia Nilsson }

Giant ice sheets in Antarctica behave like mirrors, reflecting the sun’s energy and moderating the world’s temperatures. The waxing and waning of these ice sheets contribute to changes in sea level and affect ocean circulation, which regulates our climate by transporting heat around the planet.

Despite their present-day cold temperatures, the poles were not always covered with ice. New climate records recovered from Antarctica during the recent Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) “Wilkes Land Glacial History” Expedition show that approximately 53 million years ago, Antarctica was a warm, sub-tropical environment. During this same period, known as the “greenhouse” or “hothouse” world, atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded those of today by ten times.

Then suddenly, Antarctica’s lush environment transitioned into its modern icy realm. In only 400,000 years — a mere blink of an eye in geologic time — concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreased. Global temperatures dropped. Ice sheets developed. Antarctica became ice-bound.

How did this change happen so abruptly and how stable can we expect ice sheets to be in the future?

To answer these questions, an international team of scientists participating in the Wilkes Land Glacial History Expedition spent two months aboard the scientific research vessel JOIDES Resolution in early 2010, drilling geological samples from the seafloor near the coast of Antarctica. Despite negotiating icebergs, near gale-force winds, snow, and fog, they managed to recover approximately 2,000 meters (over one mile) of sediment core.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

photo { Alessandro Zuek Simonetti }

I’m getting to that age where it pays to be proactive and start getting tested for the myriad of things that can go wrong with my body. One of the things I wanted to get over with is a check for colon cancer. Although I’m officially younger than the “suggested age” for a colonoscopy, I wanted to get it out of the way. I had read and heard too many stories about people who found polyps and how if “they had only caught them a little sooner” it would be no big deal to remove them. So I set my appointment and went for it.

Like every guy, the thought of being violated by a long tube is at the very bottom of the list of things I want to do on a summer day. I could live with having to take all the laxatives that lead up to the procedure, That’s just more time to get my reading done. But the tube up the outdoor, that’s scary.

Well this morning was the morning. I had officially lost 4 pounds to the laxative over the past 24 hours and was surprisingly not hungry after going without food for the past 24 hours as I got to the hospital at the prime time of 7am.

I was definitely nervous. Despite doctors and nurses telling me it would be a breeze, I was naturally skeptical.

A breeze was an overstatement. I can honestly say that if it made medical sense to get one done every year, i would have no problem with it. It was easy and breezy .

Once I got into the Gastro Room where they did these, they told me that they were going to knock me out, and I would get a nap and wake up like nothing happened . They were right. One minute Im talking rugby, the next I’m waking up, picking up the conversation where I left off and being told to “dispell the air in my system”.

No where else can you rip off some huge farts and have 3 nurses and a doctor, while maintaining a very professional demeanor, tell you that you aren’t done yet and demand that you let loose a few more.

{ Mark Cuban | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Barber }

Women who have a smaller waist in relation to their hips tend to be perceived as more attractive. Some argue this is an evolutionary tendency, a desire for women who are perceived to be more fertile, while others suggest it is just a product of the media who, from porn to Prada, laud the image of small waisted women.

The New York Times covers a fascinating study which tested these ideas in an innovative way - by seeing whether blind men, who have avoided the body-shape bias of visual media, would also find women with a lower waist-to-hip ratio more attractive.

{ MindHacks | Continue reading }

photo { via tittaycitay.com | NSFKids }

I’ve been there. A thousand years ago, my wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, and I traveled 3,000 miles with our daughter Jessie, then a three-year-old, to Disneyland to see “Mickey.”

We were less than 20 feet inside the Disney property when three characters, one dressed like Pluto, along with one dyspeptic-looking and another dopey-looking dwarf, rushed up and hugged my daughter. She started to hysterically scream, thinking she was being attacked by a nine-foot-tall dog and two four-foot dwarfs with giant heads. She didn’t stop crying for hours. The only character who calmed her down was an attractive young blond woman in a pink dress who was billed as Cinderella. It was quite a sight – there was Cinderella kneeling down so that she was eye level with about eight little kids who were gazing at her in awe.

There were the children’s mothers, misty-eyed at their kids’ sense of innocence and wonder. There were the kids’ fathers, standing on their toes to better look down the front of Cinderella’s dress. Forget men are from Mars, women are from Venus; this, I thought, is the difference between men and women. I remember feeling like a low-life standing there, with the other fathers, on our toes trying to get a look at Cinderella’s cleavage. I don’t know about the other men, but I hated myself. For crying out loud, I was lusting after Cinderella! What was next for me, Snow White?

Of course my daughter was too young to go on any ride except something called the “Pink Teacup.” I had to ride with her over and over, spinning around until I almost threw up the corn dogs, frozen bananas and icky green drink that I had eaten because it was the stuff that passed as food in Disney World in those days.

Did I learn my lesson that trip? Of course not – a few years later, I carried my sleeping four-year-old son on my back for hours at Epcot Center in Florida. After a while, he felt like he weighed 200 pounds. This may give me a heart attack, I thought to myself. Then I started wondering if the EMS guys, who were going to have to paddle my heart back into rhythm, would arrive with paddles that had Disney characters painted on them.

{ Jerry Della Femina/The Indepedent | Continue reading }

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888 }

{ Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 | Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Hora, 1999 }

related:

{ The Pope of Greenwich Village | video | jump to the 2:00 mark }

How long does it take for a litre of water to go through our body?

For normal people it should take about 2 to 3 hours… But it depends on several things.

First, the water has to be absorbed. For example, if someone has really bad diarrhea or is vomiting, the fluid won’t be absorbed.

Second, it depends on what is in the water. If it is pure water rather than water with salt in it, the pure water will be excreted faster than salt water.

Third, if someone is dehydrated, say, was playing soccer for two hours and sweated out two more litres water than he drank, the fluid would stay in his body and his rate of urine production will stay really low until he drinks more.

Fourth, it depends on the time of day. Usually, people’s rate of urine production decreases in the middle of the night and increases around the time we wakes up.

Finally, it depends on the state of health of the person. If a person has kidney disease, the urine production might not increase as much. If a person has heart disease, the fluid May build up in his tissues instead of being excreted.

The reference is a paper where students drank water in the morning and determined how long it took for the water to be excreted. In this paper, it looks like they urinated out about 400 or 500 ml of water over about 2 hours, before the rate of urine production slowed down.

The water runs down the throat, past the epiglottis (which is closed so that water doesn’t end up in the lungs) and down through the oesophagus into the stomach.

In the stomach, water is needed to assist in the processing and digestion of food. So far, the body has not absorbed any water. The only thing that has happened is that any thirst was probably quenched and the amount of saliva has increased.

The water and food are mixed into a dough and kneaded out into the intestines.

In the small intestine, the body starts to absorb fluid, as well as vitamins and other nutrients from the dough. These nutrients are absorbed by the blood and transported to all the body’s cells…

The large intestine’s task is to absorb as much liquid as possible from the thin batter, so that the body can make use of this liquid and achieve a proper balance of body fluids. This is Important, as 60% of the human body is made of water.

The liquid is absorbed by the blood vessels in the large intestine and transported by the blood to the kidneys. In the kidneys, blood is purified and water is converted into urine which flows through the ureters to the bladder. When the bladder contains about 200 - 400ml of urine, signals are usually sent to the brain to promote urination.

{ treebeard31 }