(image by Jeremiah)
Why is it that once you learn something incorrectly (say, 7 X 9 = 65), it seems you never can correct your recall?
—J. Kruger, Cherry Hill, N.J.
Cognitive psychologist Gordon H. Bower of Stanford University answers:
Identifying, correcting and averting our memory errors are part of a cognitive process called memory monitoring. Incorrect associations can be tough to change, but we can use techniques to retrain our brain.
When strong habits impede our ability to acquire a desired new habit or association, we experience a common phenomenon known as proactive interference. Wrong associations appear in common spelling errors such as “wierd” for “weird” and “neice” for “niece.” Persistent mistaken connections also can cause embarrassing errors, such as calling a man’s second wife by the name of his first. Interference is stronger the more previous wives you’ve had to deal with, and it is more difficult to overcome the stronger the habits are.
“Revolution is not ‘showing’
life to people, but making
them live. A revolutionary
organization must always
remember that its objective
is not getting its adherents
to listen to convincing talks
by expert leaders, but getting
them to speak for themselves,
in order to achieve, or at least
strive toward, an equal
degree of participation.”
Thomas Cole / Romantic Landscape, about 1826. Close-up of Rain on Butterfly Wings (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It’s embedded in our genes.
“Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat.
But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits.
Ulrich monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall.
Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art.
Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth.”
“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use” (Arthur Koestler).
A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience suggesting that seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.
“Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see,” says Adam Anderson, a U of T professor of psychology. “Specifically our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision. The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The U of T team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods. They found that donning the rose-colored glasses of a good mood is less about the color and more about the expansiveness of the view.
The researchers first showed subjects a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood. Subjects were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the center, surrounded by “place” images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face. When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background.
However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses. The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal “place area” — that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.
“Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment, which sounds like a good thing, but it also can result in distraction,” says Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student of Anderson’s and lead author of the study. “Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage. Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus.”
The symposium ‘Positions in flux: On the changing role of the artist and institution in the networked society’ will center on some of the major parameters for the current and future development of contemporary art. In particular it will reflect on the aspect of cultural sustainability of art projects, art and technology initiatives and art curating.
‘Positions in flux’ will give floor to international artists, theoreticians, critics, cultural producers and aims to initiate a truly critical debate. The symposium is designed for a broad audience working in the field of contemporary culture and art, with a desire to understand what comes ahead and how to respond to these changes on an artistic or institutional level. ‘Positions in flux’ will provide a platform and “thinkspace” for artists, cultural workers, theoreticians and a broader public to envision the future in our field and to provide us with the necessary information to make choices for a meaningful and sustainable development of society and culture.
The three panel discussions follow a clear thematic scheme and try to bring in as much expertise and viewpoints as possible. The panels are interlinked and designed to initiate an ongoing discussion among the participants. (Text by The Netherlands Media Art Institute)
The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible electromagnetic radiation frequencies.[1] The “electromagnetic spectrum” (usually just spectrum) of an object is the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation from that particular object.
The electromagnetic spectrum extends from below frequencies used for modern radio (at the long-wavelength end) through gamma radiation (at the short-wavelength end), covering wavelengths from thousands of kilometers down to a fraction the size of an atom. It is thought that the short wavelength limit is in the vicinity of the Planck length while the long wavelength limit is the size of the universe itself (see physical cosmology), although in principle the spectrum is infinite and continuous. (from Wiki)
The question has fuelled some of history’s fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer.
The monster Caliban, according to his master, Prospero, was “a devil, a pure devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. Yet only a few decades before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, St Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuit order, with its famous maxim: “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.”
This ancient debate over the relative contributions of inheritance and experience to the human condition has never been more charged than in the genetic age. On one side stood those who sought and saw genetic explanations for human psychology; on the other, those who believed it to be moulded by culture. There was little common ground. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an evolutionary psychologist, has even joked that perhaps we are genetically programmed to set nature against nurture.
CONTINUE ARTICLE HERE
An interviewer once asked Pablo Picasso why he paints such strange pictures instead of painting things the way they are.
Picasso asks the man what he means. The man then takes out a photographfrom his wallet and says, “This is my wife!” Picasso looks at the photo and then says: “isn’t she rather short and flat?”
An essay by KOERT VAN MENSVOORT.
PhD Thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology. ISBN: 978-90-386-1672-8 .
Here Van Mensvoort aims to increase our understanding of simulations and their impact on our notion of reality. Following on some observations regarding the dominant role of visual representations in our culture, I will argue that we are now living in a society, in which simulations are often more influential, satisfying and meaningful than the things they are presumed to represent. Media technologies play a fundamental role in our cycle of meaning construction. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it entirely new. Yet, it has consequences for our concepts of virtual and real, which are less complementary, than they are usually understood to be.
Nature is reputed to be red in tooth and claw, but many arms races across the animal kingdom are characterized by restraint rather than carnage. Competition among males is often expressed in the form of elaborate weapons made of bone, horn or chitin. The weapons often start off small and then, under the pressure of competition, may evolve to attain gigantic proportions. The Irish elk, now extinct, had antlers with a span of 12 feet. The drawback of this magnificent adornment, though, was that the poor beast had to carry more than 80 pounds of bone on its head.
In a new review of sexual selection, a special form of natural selection that leads to outlandish armament and decoration, Douglas J. Emlen, a biologist at the University of Montana, has assembled ideas on the evolutionary forces that have made animal weapons so diverse.
Sexual selection was Darwin’s solution to a problem posed by the cumbersome weapons sported by many species, and the baroque ornaments developed by others. They seemed positive handicaps in the struggle for survival, and therefore contrary to his theory of natural selection. To account for these extravagances, Darwin proposed that both armaments and ornaments must have been shaped by competition for mates.
In his view, the evolution of the armaments was driven by the struggle between males for females, whereas the ornaments arose from the choice, largely by females, of characteristics they prized in males. Modern biologists have devoted considerable attention to female choice and how it has led to such a riotous profusion of animal high fashion, from the plumage of birds to the colors of butterflies. Less attention has been paid to the equally rich diversity of animal weaponry.
The John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), the largest annual prize in the world.
This year it goes to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d’Espagnat for his “studies into the concept of reality”. D’Espagnat, 87, is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and is known for his work on quantum mechanics. The award will be presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace on 5 May.
D’Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin, at the invitation of the legendary physicist John Wheeler. But what has he done that’s worth £1 million?
The thrust of d’Espagnat’s work was on experimental tests of Bell’s theorem. The theorem states that either quantum mechanics is a complete description of the world or that if there is some reality beneath quantum mechanics, it must be nonlocal – that is, things can influence one another instantaneously regardless of how much space stretches between them, violating Einstein’s insistence that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
But what d’Espagnat was really interested in was what all of this meant for discerning the true nature of ultimate reality. Unlike most of his contemporaries, d’Espagnat was one of the brave ones unafraid to tackle the thorny and profound philosophical questions posed by quantum physics. (text provided by New Scientist)
Of all the truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today — deeper than our financial fissures, wider even than our most obvious political and cultural divides — one of the most important is also among the least remarked. That is the chasm in attitude that separates almost all of us living in the West today from almost all of our ancestors, over two things without which human beings cannot exist: food and sex.
The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are closely connected. About that much, philosophers and other commentators have been agreed for a very long time. As far back as Aristotle, observers have made the same point reiterated in 1749 in Henry Fielding’s famous scene in Tom Jones: The desires for sex and for food are joined at the root. The fact that Fielding’s scene would go on to inspire an equally iconic movie segment over 200 years later, in the Tom Jones film from 1963, just clinches the point.
What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want?
The nature of emotions is an ongoing scholarly debate. Over the years, many different explanations have been put forward, resulting in various emotion models. Most models are based on one of two major approaches. In the dimensional approach, emotions are being described by a small number of independent dimensions – usually two or three. For instance, the circumplex model by James Russell describes emotion via the dimensions “pleasure” and “arousal”. The categorical approach, on the other hand, assumes a finite number of basic emotions, which describe innate emotional reactions.
Grimace was based on the emotion model described in chapter 2 of Making Comics by Scott McCloud, a manual for artists how to convincingly draw facial expressions in comics. It follows the categorical approach, postulating 6 basic emotions:
“The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.”
Real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.
SoundLAB- sonic art project environments is happy to announce the online release of 52 new interviews with participating soundartists on SIP – SoundLAB Interview Project. SoundLAB – sonic art project environments is a corporate part of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne, a experimental platform for art and new media from Cologne/Germany.
2012 the movie may have been delayed from release until November, but that hasn’t stopped Sony’s online viral marketing efforts.
The latest is the Institute For Human Continuity, a site pretending to be dedicated to human survival after the world is plunged into disaster in 2012.
According to the site, the IHC has determined there is a 94% chance that the world will face disaster in 2012, and demonstrates various scenarios including death by sun spot, Planet X and something called “crustal displacement.”
It’s a slick site, and if you didn’t know it was a ploy for the movie, you might actually believe it was real, and in some ways that’s what’s wrong with it. This site plays into the hands of the real kooks who do believe the end is nigh, and it doesn’t really make anyone that more interested in the movie. (text by Inquisitr)
In this essay Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek discusses the ‘naturalization’ of capitalism and how ecology became a new field of capitalist investment. He also argues that the ultimate consequence of recent developments in biogenetics will be the ‘end of nature’ – anyone cares to introduce the good man into nextnature thinking? According to Žižek ecological apartheid will divide our urban society. Capitalism is not in control of nature and due to techno-scientific interventions the essence of the ecological order will be lost.
Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word “capitalism,” the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary – could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like “economy”? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists – even of social scientists… But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to “the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of ‘imperialism’.” In this way, when one talks about “globalization and its agents,” the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight “the American empire,” any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese “Communist” capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms… What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of “alternate modernity”: instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist “excess,” with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more “progressive,” frame.
(image by Jeremiah)
Thomas Cole / Romantic Landscape, about 1826.
Close-up of Rain on Butterfly Wings (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) 
