“Carl Sagan famously offered science as a ‘candle in the dark’ to help illuminate a ‘demon-haunted world.’ … Can science, with its systematic approach to understanding nature, offer a satisfying portrait of the natural world and our place within it? Can science provide the same existential benefits typically thought to be the sole province of religion? Some recent psychological findings suggest that it can.”
Tag: 08.07.13
The Nature Of Consciousness: A Question Without An Answer?
“We don’t know how the brain creates consciousness, the subjective you. So, can machines do it, too? Commentator Marcelo Gleiser confronts ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ and finds a world in which what we can know may have its limits.”
Researchers: Do We Like Art Because It’s Good Or Because It’s Familiar?
“The more we experience good art the more we learn to like it, whereas bad art has diminishing marginal utility. Of course, many may disagree about the respective quality of the two artists’ work, but personally I find this result encouraging.”
Could Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway Become As Popular As New York’s High Line?
“[A new] city-commissioned plan, ‘More Park, Less Way,’ focuses on turning four parcels of underutilized open space into lively neighborhood parks with amenities such as yoga, volleyball, chess boards, food kiosks and cultural programming. The aim is to make the parkway as enticing a destination for city residents – especially the 70,000 who live within a 10-minute walk – as it is for tourists.”
The Declining Marginal Utility Of Bad Art
A longstanding belief within behavioral economics held that people will usually come to like lesser-known or mediocre works of art as well as they do canonical works simply through repeated exposure. Reassuringly, a new study finds that this is not true of bad art; the more subjects saw of it, the less they liked it. (And whose work was used as the bad art in the study?)
August Is For Seeing Where Dance Is Going
Like in San Francisco. Here’s what the city’s choreographers are doing…
Lost Orson Welles Film Rediscovered In Italy
Too Much Johnson, a short silent movie “which the seminal filmmaker directed two years before coming to Hollywood to make his landmark 1941 drama Citizen Kane, … was recently found in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy.”
The Loneliness Loop: Why Feeling Sad Makes Us Shop and Shopping Makes Us Sad
“A well-timed trip to the mall is a long-approved variety of psychic medicine. No matter how preposterously officious the term ‘retail therapy’ might sound to you, research has consistently found that shopping our way out of an emotional hole really does work. Sometimes.”
If You Insulted A Dolphin 20 Years Ago, He’s Probably Still Bitter About It
“Dolphins, it turns out, have the longest social memories of any species besides humans. And we’re learning more and more about how lengthy those memories can actually be.”
At Amazon, Customer Reviews Of The Monet For Sale Are Coming In
“I ordered this product back in June for $1.4 million, but in July I found a similar painting by Van Gogh on sale at Target for only $800k, so I returned this one and had to pay a $14.99 restocking fee, ridiculous!!!” (There’s lots more where that came from.)