“In the prime of life, the cerebral cortex contains 25 billion neurons linked through 164 trillion synapses. Thoughts thread through 7.4 million miles of dendrite fibers and 62,000 miles of axons so compacted that the entire neural network is no larger than a coconut. No two brains are identical, nor are two minds ever the same. Wherever researcher Sandra Witelson looked, she discerned subtle patterns that only gender seemed to explain. Her findings buttress the proposition that basic mental differences between men and women stem in part from physical differences in the brain.”
Category: ideas
Video As Architecture’s Building Block
Moving images are everywhere these days, and increasingly on the surfaces of our buildings. “It is not hard to envision a day when we will live in chameleon cities, when the radiant skin of all new buildings will be programmed to produce an ever-changing array of colors, messages and shows. The movie in the church courtyard involved the transformation of a plain white wall; architects these days are integrating the evanescent image directly into their designs, using video the way their predecessors used cast iron and stone.”
New Ideas About How We Think
“For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer. More recently, however, a growing number of studies support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties — like a biological organism.”
How Filesharing Decision Will Chill Innovation
Fallout from this week’s Supreme Court decision on filesharing? Lawrence Lessig says it will chill innovation over the next decade. “By making it a process that goes through the courts, you’ve just increased the legal uncertainty around innovation substantially and created great opportunities to defeat legitimate competition. You’ve shifted an enormous amount of power to those who oppose new types of competitive technologies. Even if in the end, you as the innovator are right, you still spent your money on lawyers instead of on marketing or a new technology.”
The Science Of What We Believe
“Once the preserve of philosophers alone, belief is quickly becoming the subject of choice for many psychologists and neuroscientists. Their goal is to create a neurological model of how beliefs are formed, how they affect people and what can manipulate them. And the latest steps in the research might just help to understand a little more about why the world is so fraught with political and social tension.”
Here’s A Downer – The Worst Decision Humans Ever Made…
“Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
Of Brainstorms and (We Kid You Not) “Thought-Showers”
Want to generate lots of ideas with other people? Great! Just don’t call it “brainstorming,” at least in Belfast. “Instead staff at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) in Belfast will use the term ‘thought-showers’ when they get together to think creatively. A spokeswoman said: ‘The DETI does not use the term brainstorming on its training courses on the grounds that it may be deemed pejorative’.” To whom? People with brain disorders, of course…
What Happened To Cultural Theory?
“While Theory has become a humdrum intellectual matter within the humanities and a nonexistent or frivolous one without, it has indeed acquired a professional prestige that is as strong as ever. This is the paradox of its success, and failure. Intellectually speaking, twenty-five years ago Theory was an adventure of thought with real stakes.” Now?
Chilling Effect – How Music Rights Are Killing Film
The process of getting rights for music for video or film has become so cumbersome and so expensive, even low-budget documentaries are being changed because of rights problems. Here’s a chilling account of what it took to clear music for just one project…
What If Victor Hugo Had Been Patented? (Yikes!)
“A novel and a modern complex computer programme have certain points in common: each is large and implements many ideas. Suppose patent law had been applied to novels in the 1800s; suppose states such as France had permitted the patenting of literary ideas. How would this have affected Hugo’s writing? How would the effects of literary patents compare with the effects of literary copyright?”