YouTube
I get this way for anything with bacon in it.
Via Jezebel
13 July 2010
Religious Belief May Have Shaped Human Mind's Evolution
Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence. In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution. “The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.Read more at Wired Science [October 2009]
In a study published ... in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief. People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.
The results are full of caveats, from a small sample size to the focus on a western God. But they fit with Grafman’s earlier work on how religious sentiment triggers other neural networks involved in social cognition. That research, published in March [2009] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, suggested that the capacity for religious thought may have bootstrapped a primitive human brain into its current, socially sophisticated form.
Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said. The evolution of our brains continues, said Grafman. “The way we think now is not the way we thought 3,000 years ago,” he said. “The nature of how we believe might change as well.”
12 July 2010
Affirmation Or Disrespect? Family Dances At Auschwitz
YouTube
From Neatorama:
Jane Korman’s 89-year-old father Adolek Kohn arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car over 65 years ago. In 2009, he returned to Auschwitz and other locations in Poland associated with the Holocaust and did a victory dance with his daughter and several of his grandchildren. See parts two and three of this project as well. When Korman first exhibited the videos in Australia, she received quite a bit of criticism ...Jane Korman writes on YouTube:
On a recent trip to Europe, a family of three generations (a Holocaust survivor, his daughter and his grandchildren) dance to Gloria Gaynor's pop song 'I Will Survive' at concentration camps and memorials throughout Europe. This dance is a tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit and a celebration of life. Despite the systematic brutality and cruelty endured, we have still survived.I recommend watching all three parts.
Hyperactivitypography From A To Z
From Chapter F
From Chapter P
From Chapters V and W
Studio 3 is an in-school design agency at the Graphic Design Department of Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo, Norway. Studio 3 was established in 2002 and [consists] of a handpicked selection of 15 truly dedicated 3rd year graphic design students.I love typography and appreciate that only nerds who also love typography could have created this book. What a labor of love! Click here to page through the whole book. It's amazing.
Studio 3 via Neatorama
11 July 2010
Periodic Table Of Swearing
Click image to enlarge
Modern Toss via Laughing Squid
ETA: Don't enlarge the image if you are easily offended by swear words. Duh.
You might also like the Periodic Table of Smellements and the Database of Periodic Tables.
10 July 2010
Archinode Studios | Pig Meat Houses, Fab Tree Habs, And Ecotariums
The Pig Meat House
This is an architectural proposal for the fabrication of 3D printed extruded pig cells to form real organic dwellings. It is intended to be a "victimless shelter", because no sentient being was harmed in the laboratory growth of the skin. We used sodium benzoate as a preservative to kill yeasts, bacteria and fungi. Other materials in the model matrix are collagen powder, xanthan gum, mannitol, cochineal, sodium pyrophosphate, and recycled PET plastic scaffold.
The Fab Tree Hab Village
The Fab Tree Hab presents a sophisticated methodology to grow homes from living native trees. This 100% living habitat is prefabricated using Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) reusable scaffolding, manufactured off-site in advance. These scaffold sections can be readily shipped and assembled to fit local tree and woody plant species. Therefore, we enable dwellings to be a fully integrated part of an ecological community.
The North Pole Ecotarium
The Future North Ecotarium propaganda project is based on the premise that within the next hundred years our climate will be irreversible altered. Massive migrations of urban populations will need to move north to escape severe flooding and increased temperatures.Much more at Archinode Studio
Via io9
08 July 2010
Potential New Treatment For Alzheimer's
Left: Normal Brain. Right: Alzheimer’s Disease Brain.
Source: The Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral (ADEAR).
Scientists have discovered a compound that restores the capacity to form new memories in aging rats, likely by improving the survival of newborn neurons in the brain's memory hub. The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, has turned up clues to a neuroprotective mechanism that could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer's disease.Read more at NIH News
"This neuroprotective compound, called P7C3, holds special promise because of its medication-friendly properties," explained Steven McKnight, Ph.D., who co-led the research with Andrew Pieper, M.D., Ph.D., both of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. "It can be taken orally, crosses the blood-brain barrier with long-lasting effects, and is safely tolerated by mice during many stages of development."
"This striking demonstration of a treatment that stems age-related cognitive decline in living animals points the way to potential development of the first cures that will address the core illness process in Alzheimer’s disease," said NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D.
Happy Birthday To Me
Lanny-yap is one year old today. Many thanks to everyone who has supported the blog over the past year.
Craving Romantic Rejection
Researchers have linked rejection by a romantic partner to brain activity associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings, according to a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Lucy Brown, Ph.D., clinical professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is the corresponding author of the study. This is the third publication in which Dr. Brown and her research group demonstrated that primitive reward and survival systems are activated in people who look at their beloved.Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of 15 college-age adults who had recently been rejected by their partners but reported that they were still intensely “in love.” Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants’ brains were activated, including the ventral tegmental area, which controls motivation and reward and is known to be involved in feelings of romantic love; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction, specifically the dopaminergic reward system evident in cocaine addiction; and the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, which are associated with physical pain and distress.
By tying these specific areas of the brain to romantic rejection, the research provides insight into the anguished feelings that can accompany a break-up, as well as the extreme behaviors that can occur as a result, such as stalking, homicide and suicide.
“Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a ‘natural’ addiction,” said Dr. Brown. “Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology. A natural recovery, to pair up with someone else, is in our physiology, too.”
What You Hear Can Affect What You See
Can hearing a word change what one sees? Although visual sensitivity is known to be enhanced by attending to the location of the target, perceptual enhancements of following cues to the identity of an object have been difficult to find. Here, we show that perceptual sensitivity is enhanced by verbal, but not visual cues.Read the article at PLoS ONE
Participants completed an object detection task in which they made an object-presence or -absence decision to briefly-presented letters. Hearing the letter name prior to the detection task increased perceptual sensitivity. A visual cue in the form of a preview of the to-be-detected letter did not. Follow-up experiments found that the auditory cuing effect was specific to validly cued stimuli. The magnitude of the cuing effect positively correlated with an individual measure of vividness of mental imagery; introducing uncertainty into the position of the stimulus did not reduce the magnitude of the cuing effect, but eliminated the correlation with mental imagery.
Hearing a word made otherwise invisible objects visible. Interestingly, seeing a preview of the target stimulus did not similarly enhance detection of the target. These results are compatible with an account in which auditory verbal labels modulate lower-level visual processing. The findings show that a verbal cue in the form of hearing a word can influence even the most elementary visual processing and inform our understanding of how language affects perception.
Via io9
07 July 2010
06 July 2010
Cat Is The Hat
05 July 2010
04 July 2010
Keeping An Open Mind | The Willpower Paradox
Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.Read more at Scientific American
It’s a tricky concept for many and must be taken on faith. But now there may be science to back it up. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions. In short, he identified some key traits needed not only for long-term abstinence but for any personal objective, from losing weight to learning to play guitar.
Senay did this by exploring self-talk. Self-talk is just what it sounds like—that voice in your head that articulates what you are thinking, spelling out your options and intentions and hopes and fears, and so forth. It is the ongoing conversation you have with yourself. Senay thought that the form and texture of self-talk—right down to the sentence structure—might be important in shaping plans and actions. What’s more, self-talk might be a tool for exerting the will—or being willing.
Here is how Senay tested this notion. He had a group of volunteers work on a series of anagrams—changing the word “sauce” to “cause,” for example, or “when” to “hewn.” But before starting this task, half the volunteers were told to contemplate whether they would work on anagrams, while the others simply thought about the fact that they would be doing anagrams in a few minutes. The difference is subtle, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves and their will. It is the difference between “Will I do this?” and “I will do this.”
The results were provocative. People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.
These findings are counterintuitive. Think about it. Why would asserting one’s intentions undermine rather than advance a stated goal? Perhaps, Senay hypothesized, it is because questions by their nature speak to possibility and freedom of choice. Meditating on them might enhance feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, creating a mind-set that promotes success.
Post My Pillow
Write, erase, write. Call me. I love you. Make the bed. I’ll miss you. Buy milk...Veinticuatrodientes via The Presurfer
This cushion allows you to write and to erase all the messages that you want. To erase a message, remove pillow case and simply rinse under cold water. Doesn't need soap. Only use the pen provided.
02 July 2010
Hang A Dry Martini On Your Wall
Champagne
Vodka
Pina Colada
Dry Martini
BevShots are your favorite beers, wines and cocktails photographed under a microscope and featured as modern art. Printed on high-quality canvas or archival paper, BevShots’ vibrant colors and abstract patterns bring an edgy element to any room in your home or office.The Presurfer
01 July 2010
Damanhur
Earth Temple
Labyrinth
Over thirty years ago, a handful of initiates into a vibrant and esoteric Italian mystery school took up hand drills and picks and started to dig a hole into the side of a mountain in the foothills of the Alps. The property, an hour north of Turin in the Valchiusella valley, was called the Federation of Damanhur, and it is now one of the most complex, dynamic, and creative intentional communities on the planet.Read Erik Davis's essay about Damanhur at HiLobrow
With over six hundred permanent residents, and hundreds of more “citizens” of various grades scattered around Italy and the world, Damanhur possesses an enviable range of quality businesses, workshops, schools, healing centers, and quasi-independent collective homes, all organized according to an innovative governance system notable for its pragmatism and productivity. Damanhur organizes conferences, restores medieval buildings, sells high-end cloth and foodstuffs, and trades goods and services among themselves using their own currency.
But the community’s on-the-ground success story pales in comparison to what that hole in a mountain became. Over the weeks and years, without much formal training, working at night and with music blaring to cover up the drills, a select crew of Damanhurians hollowed out a series of mighty chambers and passageways, all without other members of the community—to say nothing of the greater world—clueing-in to their secret work. With tenacious devotion and a startling degree of art, they transformed these underground spaces into the Temples of Humankind: a remarkable otherworldly honeycomb of sacred murals, onyx mosaics, stained glass, sculpture, inlaid marble, hidden passageways, precious metals, mirrored stone, alchemical elixirs, and—who knows?—maybe even the cosmic energy circuits, intergalactic portals, and temporal wormholes that the people of Damanhur suggest are the ultimate functions of their sacred architecture.
Via io9
Put On Your Giant Underpants
After seeing Paul Reubens perform as Pee-wee Herman onstage in Los Angeles, Judd Apatow (The Hangover, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is developing a Pee-wee Herman adventure pic for Universal under the Apatow Productions banner. Reubens is writing it with Paul Rust. No director is set.Deadline via Gawker
Official PeeWee Herman Website
PostCarden
YouTube
PostCarden is designed and produced by A Studio for Design. We are an independent company based in London enthusiastic about designing thoughtful gifts that appeal to all ages. Our aim is to create charming products that respond to you and your environment.PostCarden via Everlasting Blort
... PostCarden ... can be sent easily in the post with room to write a personal greeting. PostCarden was created to be more playful, curious and interactive. It encourages you to bond, live and grow the greeting on a day by day basis. Over time the card reacts to you and your environment evolving in beauty and charm.
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