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| The New York Times | type: Connector count: 74 |
Belief in reincarnation, he said, “allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human.”
Tags: The New York Times, Reincarnation
Posted: 08.29.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect?
Posted: 07.28.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.
Tags: The New York Times, cryonics
Posted: 07.12.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Psychosis in the 21st century looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality television show starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor.
Tags: The New York Times, Psychosis
Posted: 06.01.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.
Posted: 05.11.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Unfortunately for me, there’s increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance.
Tags: The New York Times, Dreams
Posted: 04.21.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
Posted: 04.20.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
By age 12, I had a rote reply for grown-ups’ quizzical looks when they heard I went to a Waldorf school: “It’s based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.” Blank stare. “He was an Austrian philosopher who believed in teaching the whole student — mind, body and soul.”
Posted: 04.17.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
And now, just in time for Oscar junkies, comes a new statistical mincing of the movies that may someday yield an award category of its own: best fit between a movies tempo and the natural rhythms of the brain.
Posted: 03.02.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.
Posted: 02.23.10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Needless to say, not everyone will be pleased by this argument. Those strong religionists who believe that the overweening claims of science (or scientism) must be denounced daily will not be pleased by an argument that says nothing about redemption, salvation and sin, and gives full marks to science’s achievements. (Smith, a pupil of B.F. Skinner’s, has been a sympathetic and knowledgeable student of science for many years.) And those materialist atheists who see religion as the source of many of the world’s evils and all of its ignorance will not be pleased by an argument that finds an honorable place for religious beliefs and practices.
Posted: 02.01.10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Tabla is just one of the many restaurants around the country that are feverishly revising their menus. Pounded by the recession, they are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.
Tags: Psychology, The New York Times
Posted: 12.29.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The ghost-reality genre has become so diversified that it has spread across the major programming subcategories: children (Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal), animals (The Haunted), celebrities (Celebrity Ghost Stories). And it keeps growing.
Tags: The New York Times, Ghosts
Posted: 12.16.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
Posted: 11.14.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.
Posted: 10.15.09 | 1 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object this old, unusual book skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatevers been underground finally makes it to the surface.
Posted: 09.20.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world.
Posted: 09.01.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
Tags: The New York Times, Intuition
Posted: 08.02.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of societys workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.
Posted: 08.02.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
By now, it is a familiar litany. Study after study suggests that alcohol in moderation may promote heart health and even ward off diabetes and dementia. The evidence is so plentiful that some experts consider moderate drinking about one drink a day for women, about two for men a central component of a healthy lifestyle. But what if its all a big mistake?
Posted: 07.30.09 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Some naysayers, Toni Frohoff told me, might claim that these whales dont have the intelligence to know the difference between the present peaceful climate in the lagoon and what transpired in the past, that theyre not smart enough to remember that humans can inflict pain and cause death. However, historical evidence, as well as the limited data we do have on these whales, compels us to think otherwise. I mean, there are numerous stories of how they avoid certain areas and learn to stay away from particular trouble spots, as well as the simple fact that they have to be intelligent and have good memories to survive the way they have, especially navigating along their migratory route, which involves not only memory but making quick assessments and decisions that go beyond just instinctual behaviors. So for me the most plausible explanation, without having any data indicating otherwise, is that theyve now come to consider us as safe in these areas.
Posted: 07.13.09 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. What do you think of their work? I think they have nave ideas about the importance of religion in the world. They just seem oblivious to the good that religion has done, and I guess one point in my book is how malleable religion is; it has the capacity for good, which tends to come out when people see themselves as having something to gain from peaceful interaction with other people.
Posted: 06.21.09 | 2 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Both the Chinese and the Tibetan exiles are bracing for an almost inevitable outcome: the emergence into the world of dueling Dalai Lamas one chosen by the exiles, perhaps by the 14th Dalai Lama himself, and the other by Chinese officials.
Posted: 06.09.09 | 3 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
DEPRESSION THE THICK BLACK paste of it, the muck of bleakness was nothing new to me. I had done battle with it in some way or other since childhood. It is an affliction that often starts young and goes unheeded younger than would seem possible, as if in exiting the womb I was enveloped in a gray and itchy wool blanket instead of a soft, pastel-colored bunting.
Tags: The New York Times, Depression
Posted: 05.11.09 | 11 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Perhaps most importantly, we as doctors and patients must be open to evidence. Pills and surgery are potent symbols of healing power, but our faith in these symbols has often blinded us to truths. Somewhere along the line, theory trumped reality. Administering a medicine or performing a surgery became more important than its effect.
Posted: 04.09.09 | 20 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit. Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.
Tags: Memory, The New York Times
Posted: 04.06.09 | 12 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
WHEN the documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor speaks of a cinema of ideas, she means it more literally than most. Her first film, Zizek! (2005) accompanied the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek on a lecture tour. Her second, Examined Life, opening Wednesday at the IFC Center, recruits a wide array of thinkers and theorists to muse out loud about the role of philosophy in our lives, playing off the Socratic observation that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Tags: Philosophy, The New York Times
Posted: 02.21.09 | 23 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
How does an atheist prepare for death? This is a theme Diana Athill explores in Somewhere Towards the End. Her grapplings are impressive: My own belief that we, on our short-lived planet, are part of a universe simultaneously . . . ordinary . . . and incalculably mysterious . . . does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter. It feels like a state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true.
Posted: 02.13.09 | 28 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In recent years, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have come to agree, seeing metaphor making as a basic activity of the human mind. In 1980, in ''Metaphors We Live By,'' George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, head of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon, helped show how subtly metaphors permeate our lives, determining how we think and affecting our understanding. We speak of time, for example, as money, capable of being wasted, invested and spent. It may even be impossible to think about time without using metaphor. The metaphors we use are also related to our cultural preconceptions. If we think of the state as a ship being safely steered through a storm, it means we imagine an authoritative leader at the helm, not a democratically activist crew. Metaphors construct our realities. This also means, the authors suggested, that there is no ''objective truth.'' Truth, they wrote (echoing the multicultural clamor of contemporary America), ''is necessarily relative to our cultural conceptual systems.''
Posted: 01.20.09 | 31 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
This hardly seems radical any parent of more than one child will tell you that babies come into the world with distinct personalities. But what can anyone say about how the baby got to be that way? Until recently, the only portents on offer were traits that ran in the family, and even they conflated genetic tendencies with family traditions. Now, at least in theory, personal genomics can offer a more precise explanation. We might be able to identify the actual genes that incline a person to being nasty or nice, an egghead or a doer, a sad sack or a blithe spirit.
Posted: 01.14.09 | 44 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
Posted: 01.13.09 | 34 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
I will make Benoit lie and manipulate and chase sex every hour of every day, until he cant feel anything anymore, until everything good and decent about him is removed. He needs me. His life is boring when Im not in charge. I control him. I keep him numb so he can function. I make him feel good, and I make him feel worthless. The minute he steps out of this stupid rehab, Ill start whispering in his ear. Thats all it takes whispers. I win. I ALWAYS win.
Tags: The New York Times, Addiction
Posted: 01.07.09 | 29 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Prayer has found a home on the Web. Sites such as prayabout.com and ipraytoday.com have recently joined longstanding toll-free telephone services that allow anyone to request, for free, that strangers pray for them.
Posted: 12.21.08 | 42 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
But by 2006, Cinematchs improving performance had plateaued. Netflixs programmers couldnt go any further on their own. They suspected that there was a big breakthrough out there; the science of recommendation systems was booming, and computer scientists were publishing hundreds of papers each year on the subject. At a staff meeting in the summer of 2006, Hastings suggested a radical idea: Why not have a public contest? Netflixs recommendation system was powered by the wisdom of crowds; now it would tap the wisdom of crowds to get better too.
Posted: 11.29.08 | 59 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States. Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among this countrys thrill-seeking youth.
Posted: 09.11.08 | 44 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.
Posted: 09.05.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, Albert Camus wrote, and that is suicide. How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art.
Posted: 07.07.08 | 55 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankins study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, Nice weather were having.
Tags: Neuroscience, The New York Times
Posted: 06.04.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
Posted: 05.15.08 | 71 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In this memoir of a musical prodigys avatar as a Buddhist monk, Nikolai Grozni, the author of three novels published in his native Bulgaria, dwells on the overriding, blissfully benumbing feeling of resignation to the moment that keeps him in the Indian town of Dharamsala.
Tags: The New York Times, Buddhism
Posted: 05.05.08 | 39 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Rather than spotlighting the rococo workings of the human brain, the author highlights its bald frailty: the ease with which a tap on the head, as Mason puts it, can blow apart a life.
Posted: 04.13.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Biophony, Krause has theorized, is unique to each place; nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else. This idea has led him toward a controversial way of thinking that would broaden the scope of todays evolutionary biology. Many animals, he argues, have evolved to squeeze their vocalizations into available niches of the soundscape in order to be heard by others of their kind. Evolution isnt just about the competition for space or food but also for bandwidth. If a species cannot find a sonic niche of its own, it will not survive.
Posted: 04.13.08 | 78 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
But while many people are familiar with Googlegngers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection be it kinship or competition with utter strangers just because they share a name? Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.
Tags: Psychology, The New York Times
Posted: 04.10.08 | 71 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
These markets have often been more accurate than professional pollsters or market researchers. The idea is that the collected knowledge of many people, each with a different perspective, will almost surely be more accurate than an individual or small group or even experts. The concept has been championed by academic economists and was popularized by James Surowieckis 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds.
Posted: 04.09.08 | 95 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
What the past few decades of work in psychology, sociology and economics has shown, as Ariely describes, is that all three of these assumptions are false. Yes, you have a rational self, but its not your only one, nor is it often in charge. A more accurate picture is that there are a bunch of different versions of you, who come to the fore under different conditions. We arent cool calculators of self-interest who sometimes go crazy; were crazies who are, under special circumstances, sometimes rational.
Tags: The New York Times, Persuasion
Posted: 03.21.08 | 50 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
If horses can alter their own brain chemistries at will (and have good reasons to do so), what about human beings? In On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail suggests that human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states. We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels weve acquired to do so
Posted: 03.21.08 | 54 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
But these signals are more ambiguous than those he spotted in newborn babies and far more controversial in their implications. Even as some research suggests that fetuses can feel pain as preterm babies do, other evidence indicates that they are anatomically, biochemically and psychologically distinct from babies in ways that make the experience of pain unlikely. The truth about fetal pain can seem as murky as an image on an ultrasound screen, a glimpse of a creature at once recognizably human and uncomfortably strange.
Posted: 02.11.08 | 95 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostroms, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone elses computer simulation.
Posted: 01.15.08 | 58 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In Irreligion, Paulos intends to expose the inherent illogic of arguments for the existence of God. He finds these supposed proofs to be, by and large, a load of tripe.
Posted: 01.13.08 | 84 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. God exists, he wrote in black and orange paint, or if he doesnt, were in trouble. Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.
Posted: 12.20.07 | 109 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Some postmodernists speak of the end of philosophy, since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us about that which exists out there and derives, as Taylor puts it, from a power which is beyond me. At present, he writes, we live in a condition in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, he writes, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty. Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?
Posted: 12.16.07 | 87 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Its part of a recent movement known as experimental philosophy, which has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so... But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments.
Posted: 12.09.07 | 105 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In Grays telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaedas technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian war on terror are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.
Tags: Philosophy, The New York Times
Posted: 11.26.07 | 60 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A brightly painted sign in the state park explained that 450 million years ago these ancient creatures lived at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea during the Ordovician period. But none of these geologists believed it. As young-earth creationists, they think the earth is about 8,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. Thats about the amount of time conventional geology says it can take to form one inch of limestone.
Posted: 11.25.07 | 105 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant. Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.
Posted: 11.21.07 | 92 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The automatic mind generally takes care of things like muscle control. But it also does more ethereal things. It recognizes patterns and construes situations, searching for danger, opportunities or the unexpected. It also shoves certain memories, thoughts, anxieties and emotions up into consciousness. Baseball is one of those activities that are performed mostly by the automatic mind. Professional baseball players have phenomenal automatic brains.
Tags: Neuroscience, The New York Times
Posted: 11.09.07 | 89 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.
Tags: Religion, The New York Times
Posted: 11.09.07 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Where does this leave those who, while secular in outlook, still pine after immortality? A little more than a century ago, the American philosopher William James proposed an interesting way of keeping open the door to an afterlife. We know that the mind depends on the physical brain, James said. But that doesnt mean that our brain processes actually produce our mental life, as opposed to merely transmitting it. Perhaps, he conjectured, our brains allow our minds to filter through to this world from some transcendent mother sea of consciousness. Had James given his lecture a few decades later, he might have used the radio as a metaphor. When a radio is damaged, the music becomes distorted. When it is smashed, the music stops altogether. All the while, however, the signal is still out there, uncorrupted.
Posted: 11.09.07 | 89 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
THIS is the story of how a silly-sounding word reached the ear of a powerful television producer, and in only seconds of air time, expanded the vocabularies for better or worse of legions of women. The swift adoption of vajayjay is not simply about pop cultures ability to embrace new slang. Neologisms are always percolating. What this really demonstrates, say some linguists, is that there was a vacuum in popular discourse, a need for a word for female genitalia that is not clinical, crude, coy, misogynistic or descriptive of a vagina from a mans point of view.
Posted: 10.29.07 | 74 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
"All of a sudden, you have the luxury--or the curse--of being able to ponder the meaning of life," Hong said. "You ask yourself, 'Why am I not happier given how lucky I've been?'"
Tags: Technology, The New York Times
Posted: 10.28.07 | 52 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
When slipping into REM sleep, Dr. Levin said, the whole brain changes. Neurochemically, its like the Fourth of July, as cortical precincts shift colors in scanning images to indicate arousal or quiescence, he said, adding, The limbic system becomes incredibly active, much more so than when youre awake, which is why youre emotionally on edge in dreams.
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, The New York Times
Posted: 10.28.07 | 48 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
We think whats happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture, said the studys senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.
Posted: 10.28.07 | 56 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body.
Posted: 10.26.07 | 83 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A review of a book about why the separation of church and state is so difficult and so unique to the West. It also talks about Hobbes' perspective of man being a frightened ignoramus which leads to religion.
Posted: 09.26.07 | 58 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Dawkins reviews a book about Intelligent Design. Or rather, throttles a book on ID.
Posted: 09.19.07 | 91 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A new movie is coming out about lucid dreaming, the NY Times declares it a trend.
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, The New York Times
Posted: 09.16.07 | 51 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
An interesting article on what books influence CEO's thinking.
Tags: Philosophy, The New York Times
Posted: 08.31.07 | 60 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Using fMRI's to deal with pain and other preventive type uses.
Posted: 08.28.07 | 73 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Randi and other magicians discuss there art and how it relates to human fallibility.
Posted: 08.23.07 | 65 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences the sensation of drifting outside of ones own body - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
Posted: 08.23.07 | 77 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Follow up comments to the 'Life is a Simulation' article in the NY Times. Test.
Tags: Philosophy, The New York Times
Posted: 08.21.07 | 72 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A short but well thought out article about the history and future of theology and politics and different theories about how to mix the two. There crosses over into personal philosophy particularly with quotes like, "the idea decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing."
Posted: 08.20.07 | 77 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
If we create simple life simulations, what is to say that we aren't trapped in a massive simulation right now ala The Matrix? We are just patterns inside a bigger pattern.
Tags: Philosophy, The New York Times
Posted: 08.15.07 | 66 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
In a study last year, Dr. Antrobus and City College graduate students linked the bodys circadian cycle and the singular level of brain activity in REM to the high emotionality of REM dreams.
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, The New York Times
Posted: 07.26.07 | 60 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Next Show:
Monday, May 17, 2010 at 10:30pm (PDT)
| Psychology | 184 | |
| Consciousness | 144 | |
| Philosophy | 132 | |
| Religion | 116 | |
| Lucid Dreaming | 105 | |
| Neuroscience | 103 | |
| Science | 88 | |
| Out Of Body Experiences | 74 | |
| The New York Times | 74 | |
| Technology | 66 | |