“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo
01. The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a Mystery
02. How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance
03. War, Peace and the Role of Power in Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment
04. Our Dark Hearts: The Stanford Prison Experiment
05. Just Following Orders? Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment
06. Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias
07. Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory
08. How to Avoid a Bad Bargain: Don’t Threaten
09. Why We Don’t Help Others: Bystander Apathy
10. I Can’t Believe My Eyes: Conforming to the Norm
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: I’m interested in all aspects of the human mind, including aspects of the mind that have been regarded as ineffable or mysterious. The way I approach these problems is to look at patients who have sustained injury to a small region in the brain, a discipline called Behavioral Neurology or Cognitive Neuroscience these days.
Let me tell you about the problem confronting us. The brain is a 1.5 kilogram mass of jelly, the consistency of tofu, you can hold it in the palm of your hand, yet it can contemplate the vastness of space and time, the meaning of infinity and the meaning of existence. It can ask questions about who am I, where do I come from, questions about love and beauty, aesthetics, and art, and all these questions arising from this lump of jelly. It is truly the greatest of mysteries. The question is how does it come about?
When you look at the structure of the brain it’s made up of neurons. Of course, everybody knows that these days. There are 100 billion of these nerve cells. Each of these cells makes about 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons. From this information people have calculated that the number of possible brain states, of permutations and combinations of brain activity, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, M.D., PH.D., Is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and distinguished professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. Ramachandran’s early research was on visual perception but he is best known for his work in Neurology. His most recent book is The Tell-Tale Brain.
A multimedia investigation by Susan Greene at the Dart Society. Their mission is to connect and support journalists worldwide who advance the compassionate and ethical coverage of trauma, conflict and social injustice.
Susan Greene: A few weeks ago, on the fifteenth anniversary of his first day in prison, Osiel Rodriguez set about cleaning the 87 square feet he inhabits at ADX, a federal mass isolation facility in Colorado.
“I got it in my head to destroy all my photographs,” he writes in a letter to me. “I spent some five hours ripping each one to pieces. No one was safe. I did not save one of my mother, father, sisters. Who are those people anyway?”
Such is the logic of the gray box, of sitting year after year in solitude.
Whether Rodriguez had psychological problems when he robbed a bank, burglarized a pawn shop and stole some guns at age 22, or whether mental illness set in during the eight years he has spent in seclusion since trying to walk out of a federal penitentiary in Florida – it’s academic. What’s true now is that he’s sick, literally, of being alone, as are scores of other prisoners in extreme isolation.
In a 2008 paper on neuroeconomics, Stanford economist George Loewenstein said: “Whereas psychologists tend to view humans as fallible and sometime even self-destructive, economists tend to view people as efficient maximisers of self-interest who make mistakes only when imperfectly informed about the consequences of their actions.”
This view of humans as completely rational – and the market as eminently efficient – is relatively recent. In 1922, in the Journal of Political Economy, Rexford G. Tugwell, said (to paraphrase) that a mind evolved to function best in “the exhilarations and the fatigues of the hunt, the primitive warfare and in the precarious life of nomadism”, had been strangely and quickly transported into a different milieu, without much time to modify the equipment of the old life.
The field of economics has since rejected this more pragmatic (and I would argue, realistic) view of human behavior, in favor of the simpler and neater “rational choice” perspective, which viewed the power of reflection as the only force driving human behavior.
But to paraphrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, our currently held views of what is reasonable, sensible and good sense tend to take shape in response to the realities “out there” as seen through the prism of human practice – what humans currently do, know how to do, are trained, groomed and inclined to do.
We compare ourselves to people we know, and come into contact with – either through social groups, or lately, with the advent of mass and, even fragmented media, people we think are like us.
Excerpt of an article written by Paul Harrison, The Conversation. Continue HERE
Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late.
The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger—a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson.
Mitchell couldn’t get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn’t take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it.
Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn’t “sealed over” and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Written by Jonah Lehrer, WIRED. Image: Dwight Eschliman. Continue the article HERE
The key passage in John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s “The Lifespan of a Fact” (W.W. Norton: 124 pp., $17.95 paper) comes late in the book, during an exchange on the role of fact in the amorphous genre known as literary nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, or literary journalism, or, in D’Agata’s usage, “the essay.” D’Agata and Fingal are arguing about intent, and the extent to which, or whether, invention ought to be allowed.
It’s an essential question, albeit one that’s been boiled down to sound-bite status in recent years, after mini-tempests over James Frey, Margaret Seltzer and other memoirists who embellish, or falsify, their memories, and D’Agata, for one, has had enough. “I’m not calling this ‘nonfiction,’” he writes, “and neither do I tend to call anything that I write ‘nonfiction,’ because I don’t accept that term as a useful description of anything that I value in literature. The only reason this is being labeled ‘nonfiction’ by your editors is because that is one of the two binary categories that editors allow in prose.”
“The Lifespan of a Fact” offers an extended debate on that issue between D’Agata, author of the searingly good book “About a Mountain” and editor of “The Next American Essay,” and Fingal, a former fact-checker at McSweeney’s and the Believer. At the heart of their discussion is an essay D’Agata wrote, which later helped inspire “About A Mountain,” about the suicide of 16-year-old Levi Presley, who jumped from the tower observation deck of Las Vegas’ Stratosphere hotel in 2002. Commissioned by Harper’s, the piece was rejected and picked up by the Believer after many of its details could not be verified.
Excerpt of an article written by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic. Continue HERE. Image by Dolly’s Bookstore
Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.
Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.
In the Congo Basin, Bayaka pygmies patrol their forests with handheld tracking devices. Using the devices to record instances of poaching, industrial roads and illegal logging, they map their landscape, documenting the course of deforestation and harmful development.
The project is part of an emerging field that its champions describe as the ‘new wave’ of citizen science. With endeavours ranging from air-pollution assessments in Europe to chimpanzee counting in Tanzania, the next generation of citizen science attempts to make communities active stakeholders in research that affects them, and use their work to push forward policy changes. This is one of the main points of focus of the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit being held this week at the Royal Geographical Society and University College London.
Although researchers have been calling on amateurs and enthusiasts for decades to aid in collecting and processing large volumes of data, the latest approaches aim to enlist the public in helping to shape research questions, says Francois Grey, a physicist at Tsinghua University in Beijing and coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. Grey, an organizer of the summit, maintains that communities can play a valuable part in setting the agenda for scientific investigations.
Written by Katherine Rowland, Nature. Continue HERE
Jon Baskin: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, the two most important American writers of their era, both grew up in the Midwest. Franzen describes his childhood in Webster Groves, Missouri as having unfolded “in the middle of the middle [where] there was nothing but family and house and neighborhood and church and school and work.” Wallace, whose parents were both professors, spent his youth in Philo, Illinois, a “tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champagne-Urbana’s university.” Both fall in a tradition of authors (Dreiser, Hemingway, Brodkey) whose provincial, middle-American backgrounds seemingly failed to prepare them for the shock of modern life—or, perhaps, prepared them to meet that shock with precisely the sideways sensitivity of artists. Separated by less than three years in age, they wrote about similar subjects and dealt with related issues of technology, audience and the ambiguous literary heritage of postmodernism. They were united in believing that responsible fiction ought still to speak to the “desperate questions” of existence, and that the novel, if it did so, could remain vibrant and even vital in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald’s.
Yet they were radically different writers, in many ways as profoundly unalike as two contemporaries treating similar subject matter could be. Most often, their difference has been accounted for in terms of style, or with reference to their divergent attitudes toward “realism.” Despite an early flirtation with postmodern plotting, Franzen is considered to be a conventional realist, perhaps the paragon present-day producer of what Benjamin Kunkel has called the perennial novel, blending dialogue, psychological insight and third-person narration in “proportions that now seem classical.” Wallace, meanwhile, has been named by Zadie Smith as one of the “avant-garde challengers to realism”—those perennial antagonists of the perennial novel. His digressions, “spiraling narrative loops,” and footnotes-within-footnotes have led him to be counted in the modernist or postmodernist camp, the latest in a line of writers known for defining themselves against the pities of traditional style. In a recent review of an experimental European writer, James Wood said Wallace was among those “at odds with a merely grammatical realism, whereby the real is made to fall into approved units and packets.”
The Antipode Foundation, Antipode’s new companion website/blog. Rather than a repository for so many addenda, or somewhere to send material which can’t ‘cut it’ in the pages of the journal, we want this to be something with a point, something of significance, working to create and support a radical geography community. Rather than a cynical exercise in advertising, or some modish initiative launched unthinkingly, we want this to be something with as much purpose and direction, substance and quality, and vitality and energy as its parent journal. With all this firmly in mind, we’ll be extending some already existing projects as well as launching some new ones.
Since August 1969 Antipode has published peer-reviewed papers which offer a radical (Marxist/socialist/anarchist/anti-racist/feminist/queer/green) analysis of geographical issues and whose intent is to engender the development of a new and better society. Now appearing five times a year and published by Wiley-Blackwell, Antipode continues to publish some of the best and most provocative radical geographical work available today; work from both geographers and their fellow travellers; from scholars both eminent and emerging.
Antipode sponsors two keynote lectures each year; one at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting and one at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) annual conference. We invite presenters who represent both the political commitment and intellectual integrity that characterize a radical journal of geography.
Beyond the Neoliberal Zombieland. Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), August 2011
Seven individuals who participated in what’s being called the “first annual love competition” all agreed to follow the same set of instructions:
Climb inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and spend five minutes trying “to love someone as hard as they can.”
As the contestants–who ranged in age from 10 to 75–pondered the objects of their affection, their brain neurochemistry was closely monitored by scientists at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. The person who showed the greatest neurochemical activity in the brain region associated with feelings of romantic love was declared the victor.
Who climbed out of the scanner with best-lover honors? To find out, you can watch the short film about the competition, above— the competition and the film were masterminded by San Francisco-based filmmaker Brent Hoff. As to why Hoff wanted to make “The Love Competition” in the first place, he told Wired, “With the way we view sports, we look at them in such a hard, unforgiving way–you win or you don’t–and the idea of taking love and making it either you win or you don’t’ is, I agree, kind of horrible. But that’s not what this film is.”
And he’s right. The film–which includes scenes in which the contestants talk about the objects of their affection–is actually quite touching. And it provides a fascinating glimpse inside the world of neuroscience research as well as into the contestants’ brains.
This interdisciplinary study fuses analysis of feminist literature and manifestos, radical political theory, critical vanguard studies, women’s performance art, and popular culture to argue for the animal liberation movement as successor to the liberationist visions of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, most especially the Surrealists. These vanguard groups are judiciously critiqued for their refusal to confront their own misogyny, a quandary that continues to plague animal activists, thereby disallowing for cohesion and full recognition of women’s value within a culturally marginalized cause.
This volume is of interest to anyone who is concerned about the continued—indeed, escalating—violence against nonhumans. More broadly, it will interest those seeking new pathways to challenge the dominant power constructions through which oppression of humans, nonhumans, and the environment thrives. Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde ultimately poses the animal liberation movement as having serious political and cultural implications for radical social change, destruction of hierarchy and for a world without shackles and cages, much as the Surrealists envisioned.
Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation
By: Kim Socha
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2012, XIV, 258 pp.
Pb: 978-90-420-3423-5
€ 54 / US$ 81
Kim Socha is an animal activist and sits on the board of the Animal Rights Coalition in Minneapolis, MN. Holding a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, she works as a composition and literature instructor with publications in the areas of surrealism, Latino literature and pedagogy.
How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of “Thingness,” the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center’s programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives. Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the “agentic assemblages” they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to “things,” can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman’s materialism.
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated—Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out—“anything that flies on anything that moves”—a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.
Dickens was from childhood an avid, even compulsive, walker. He once wrote. “I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.” Scarcely a day went by that Dickens didn’t flee his desk and take to the streets of London and its suburbs. He routinely walked as many as 20 miles a day, and once set out at 2 a.m. to walk from his house in London to his country residence in Gad’s Hill, Kent, 30 miles away. As several of his walking companions described it, he had a distinctive “swinging” gait. And, like many a serious runner of today, he “made a practice of increasing his speed when ascending a hill,” according to his friend Marcus Stone.
Dickens’s walks served him in two ways. On one level, they were fact-finding missions during which he recorded with his keen eye the teeming urban landscapes whose descriptions were his stock-in-trade. A letter from Paris to a family friend, the Reverend Edward Tagart, begins innocently enough, “I have been seeing Paris.” But what follows is a foot tour of the city that is characteristically Dickensian: “Wandering into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert-rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces and Wine Shops. In my unoccupied fortnight of each month, every description of gaudy and ghastly sight has been passing before me in rapid Panorama.”
But Dickens’s walks played another, more important role in his life. They were, in a sense, acts of self-preservation. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once confessed, “I think I should just explode and perish.” Unlike his contemporary, Anthony Trollope, who claimed he reeled off 3,000 words each morning before breakfast, Dickens found composition to be hard, painful work. The hours he spent at his desk agitated him tremendously, and walking served as a kind of safety valve.
Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.
This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
Marked by Foer’s moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the humor and style that made his previous books, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Foer’s latest tour de force informs and delights, challenging us to explore what is too often conveniently brushed aside. A celebration and a reckoning, Eating Animals is a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His work has received numerous awards and been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle.
The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘environmental ethics’, has been characterized by a variety of theoretical disputes about the best way to provide a philosophical basis for engagement with the environmental problems facing us, now and in the future. Many of the early writers hoped that a new environmental ethics would emerge, embodying a set of principles that could help us deal with our relation to animals and the natural world in a way that traditional ethical theories seemed to have overlooked.
One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues. Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.
Leopold carried forward a discussion by nineteenth century conservationists about whether nature should be preserved only because of its economic and practical benefits for humans or because it provides value beyond merely supplying natural resources. He mentioned the songs of birds and the beauty of flowers as being part of nature’s bounty. He also brought into focus the importance of the interconnection of things in nature, defending the kind of holistic perspective which has since played such a crucial role in scientific ecology. He insisted that environmental ethics should focus on systems and not just on individual things. Our human dependence on nature cannot be understood without a deep ecological study of the interconnectedness of life. Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book Silent Spring, which was so important in stimulating environmental awareness, is a good example of this approach to conservation.
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
CAMBRIDGE – One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, it is said, are largely powerless in the face of global markets.
The global financial crisis has shattered this myth. Who bailed out the banks, pumped in the liquidity, engaged in fiscal stimulus, and provided the safety nets for the unemployed to thwart an escalating catastrophe? Who is re-writing the rules on financial-market supervision and regulation to prevent another occurrence? Who gets the lion’s share of the blame for everything that goes wrong? The answer is always the same: national governments. The G-20, the International Monetary Fund, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision have been largely sideshows.
Even in Europe, where regional institutions are comparatively strong, it is national interest and national policymakers, largely in the person of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have dominated policy making. Had Merkel been less enamored of austerity for Europe’s debt-distressed countries, and had she managed to convince her domestic electorate of the need for a different approach, the eurozone crisis would have played out quite differently.
Written by Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate. Continue HERE
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?
By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
Americans are increasingly aware that the ideal of equal opportunity is a false promise, but neither party really seems to get it.
Republicans barely admit the problem exists, or if they do, they think tax cuts are the answer. All facts point in the opposite direction. Despite various tax cuts over the past 30 years, not only have income and wealth inequality dramatically increased, but the ability of individuals to rise out of their own class has declined. Social stagnation is increasingly the norm, with poverty rates the highest in 15 years, real wage gains worse even than during the decade of the Great Depression, average earnings barely above what they were 50 years ago, and more than 80 percent of the income growth of the past 25 years going to the top 1 percent. In fact, since 1983, the bottom 40 percent of households have seen real declines in their income and the same goes for the bottom 60 percent when it comes to wealth. We know what the economic status quo does: It redistributes upwards.
Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.
Written by Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana, Salon. Continue HERE
With the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ on the 24th November 1859, Charles Darwin not only explained how and why we have the diversity of life we see all around us, but also showed how all life is connected.
Since then we have continued to gather evidence from a range of different disciplines including physiology, biochemistry and DNA analysis. The evidence indicates that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, a genealogical relationship that can be represented as an evolutionary tree known as the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life illustrates how different species arise from previous species via descent with modification, and that all of life is connected. The diagram above shows the relationship between the major biological groups. The center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth, the outer branches the major biological groups.
The tree is based on research carried out by: David Hillis, Derrick Zwickl and Robin Gutell from the University of Texas. It is based on analysis of small sub-unit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life.
Via BBC. Download a Tree of Life poster in .pdf format to print out and keep HERE
In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he’d met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign. By the forties, he was one of the industry’s grand old men, ready to pass on the lessons he’d learned. His book “Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success—“To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame”—and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” he wrote.
Written by Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker. Continue HERE
Trent Arsenault has never had sex, but he’s the father of fifteen children—and counting. The more he antagonizes the FDA, and unnerves television audiences across America, the more his in-box is flooded with requests for his sperm.
Trent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest two-bedroom ranch house plus a few tents Trent has erected in the backyard. It’s a warren of floor-to-ceiling modular shelving built to hold all of Trent’s worldly property, which he stores in 800 bins weighing 24,000 pounds. In what was designed to be the living room, a Tempur-Pedic adjustable bed is situated within the shelving units, and an identical second bed next to the first serves as a workstation, with swing-out hospital trays for a desk.
A flat-screen TV is mounted face down, directly over Trent’s pillow, and another is mounted in his shower. Wires snake everywhere. A hose system on a timer automatically refills the birdbaths outside. Behind the house, near a lemon tree, a 50-foot antenna collects radio-astronomy data from solar flares and broadcasts Trent’s ham-radio signal. Inside, there is a low, near-constant murmur of electronic machinery: radio static, conference-call chatter from Trent’s IT security work, digital chimes, a dulcet computer voice announcing Trent’s next appointment. It is an elaborate system, and it reminds Trent, in a good way, of the devouring cybernetic empire in Star Trek. “The more complex the better.”
Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with.
The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity.
Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity.
After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.
A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cilindrical constructions called Towers of Silence.
Via Socks Studio. Please be aware that some of the images at the end of the post are extremely graphic. Viewer discretion is advised. Continue HERE
We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know.”
David Dobbs says: As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths — resilience, lasting happiness, empathy. If you’re used to the disease model of genes that are associated with mood and behavioral problems, this hypothesis can seem puzzling. The turn lies in viewing problems such as depression, distractibility, or even aggression as downsides of a heightened sensitivity to experience that can also generate assets and contentment.
I first wrote about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis in an Atlantic article two years ago. Last week, New Scientist published a feature I wrote about some of the research I’ve come across while researching the book. The article is behind a paywall now, so you’ll need a subscription to read it; I’ll post the whole thing here in a few weeks when the New Scientist exclusive-run period ends. In the meantime, I thought I’d excerpt here a couple passages of particular interest.
One is the opener, which describes how toddlers react to a clever test of their generosity and then lays out the gist of the hypothesis. The other is a multigenic study that sought to expand the hypothesis beyond single-gene candidate-gene studies.
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia. By unraveling them, we may be able to learn more about how we become our unique selves, and possibly even how to alter those selves.
Mapping all those connections may sound like a daunting task, but MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung believes it can be done — one cubic millimeter of brain tissue at a time.
“When you start to explain how difficult it would be to find the connectome of an entire brain, people ask, ‘What’s the point? That seems too far off.’ But even finding or mapping the connections in a small piece of brain can tell you a lot,” says Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience and physics at MIT.
Even more than our genome, our connectome shapes who we are, says Seung, who outlines his vision for connectome research in a new book, Connectome, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Clearly genes are very important, but because they don’t change after the moment of conception, they can’t really account for the effects of experience,” he says.
Many functions have been suggested for low mood or depression, including communicating a need for help, signaling yielding in a hierarchy conflict, fostering disengagement from commitments to unreachable goals, and regulating patterns of investment.
A more comprehensive evolutionary explanation may emerge from attempts to identify how the characteristics of low mood increase an organism’s ability to cope with the adaptive challenges characteristic of unpropitious situations in which effort to pursue a major goal will likely result in danger, loss, bodily damage, or wasted effort. In such situations, pessimism and lack of motivation may give a fitness advantage by inhibiting certain actions, especially futile or dangerous challenges to
dominant figures, actions in the absence of a crucial resource or a viable plan, efforts that would damage the body, and actions that would disrupt a currently unsatisfactory major life enterprise when it might recover or the alternative is likely to be even worse. These hypotheses are consistent with considerable evidence and suggest specific tests. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2000;57:14-20
Beyond the Neoliberal Zombieland. Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), August 2011
....................................
