What Exactly Is Consciousness? Here’s What We Know So Far

“What underlies being conscious specifically, as opposed to just being awake? We know it’s not just the number of neurons involved. The cerebellum (the so-called ‘little brain’ hanging off the back of the cortex) has about four times as many neurons as the rest of the brain, but seems barely involved in maintaining conscious level. It’s not even the overall level of neural activity – your brain is almost as active during dreamless sleep as it is during conscious wakefulness. Rather, consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other, in specific ways.”

Artists Light Up Empty Homes To Draw Attention To Abandonment Issues

“Breathing Lights” is a $1.2 million art project created by Frelin and architect Barbara Nelson in the browned-out, former manufacturing hub of Albany, Troy and Schenectady, N.Y. Using LED strips, portable batteries and programmed Arduino boards, they have built light panels and had them installed inside window frames. They’re looking to draw attention, through art, to abandoned spots once called homes.

Study: Male Creativity Is Different From Female Creativity. Here’s How

The results suggest men are more likely to produce radical breakthroughs, but women are more likely to be highly creative in a different but equally important realm. As one writer puts it, “adaptive creativity is incremental in nature and tends to work within existing structures or processes. Adaptive creativity is focused on process improvement or unique strategies to carry out a routine objective.”

Historians As Policy Advisors? Here’s Why That Isn’t A Good Idea

“History reveals the enormous variety and variability of human institutions and behaviour, setting clear limits on the validity and plausibility of any universalising generalisations. The problem for any would-be applied historian lies in converting this necessary corrective of over-confident social-scientific assertions or politicians’ simplistic assumptions – the historian’s reflex ‘actually, it’s rather more complicated than that’ – into anything resembling the sort of practical policy advice that politicians or civil servants will ever take seriously.”