Category: ideas

“A new scientific study says prehistoric hunters loved to be dripping in luxury goods, and the taste for flashy trinkets may have been what turned humans from savages into a civilised society.”

Feeling anxious? Well, it’s not just a feeling that comes out of nowhere. “The areas of the brain involved in learning fears have been known, but new research now identifies the areas involved in extinguishing those fears.”

“A wristwatch phone that lets you listen by sticking a finger in your ear, an MP3 player that vibrates the bones in your skull to play music that only you can hear — these are some of the products being developed using a technology called bone conduction that sends sound waves through the bones around the ear.”

Is the way to better health found in playing games? “Dozens of games have been developed in recent years to train physicians, educate patients, improve fitness and help treat the addicted and the mentally ill. Dozens more are on the way.”

French for “already seen”, déjà vu is “the sort of fleeting, intimate experience that reveals itself more readily to novelists than to researchers. As recently as the 1990’s, social scientists doing population surveys asked about it in the same breath as they inquired about poltergeists and contact with the dead. But new research on memory has opened a promising window on the phenomenon, providing both possible explanations for the sensation and novel ways to create and measure it.”

“We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity – all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.”

Sociologist Michael Mann has spent a career writing an acclaimed series of books on the history of power. Things were going fine, but then he got to the 20th Century, and it all got so complicated…

Think you hear things differently from other people? Well, you may. “All ears are not created equal, a new report suggests, even two on the same head. Results published in the current issue of the journal Science indicate that infants process sounds differently through their left ears than they do through their right ones.”

Tests of personality are everywhere these days. “Clearly, there’s something about the elusive notion of personality, and the possibility of capturing it, that draws us to these tests. But an increasingly vocal group of critics is fighting this testing tsunami, arguing that many of the tests themselves have not been tested and that their unscientific conclusions may do far more harm than good.”

As America steamrolls towards a vitally important presidential election with bitter recriminations flying on all sides and wild-eyed fury replacing measured discourse, Philip Kennicott sees a distinct split in the art world, mirroring the polarization of the U.S. population. “The arts are sorting themselves out into two camps: one that prizes independence, provocation and even direct political engagement, and another that offers a refuge apart from controversy and argument. They are, in short, diverging down either a secessionist path (come with us, if you will) or a concessionist route (we will work to please as many as we can). Both paths have their promise and their danger.”