Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’ A few years later, I reluctantly lent my collection of magazines to a (now former) friend. He had just bought a house that he had no idea what to do with. I, on the other hand, had nothing but ideas. O.K., they weren’t strictly mine, in the sense that these ideas were acquired, arranged, styled, photographed, published and distributed by entities bearing no relation to me whatsoever.
They were mine because I internalized them. I gradually convinced myself that they were me. Of course, I didn’t realize any of this until my friend returned my magazines to me with dozens of pages torn out, having either forgotten or ignored my admittedly ridiculous request that he make photocopies instead. The whole embarrassing situation could have been avoided if Pinterest existed then. This kind of visual catch-bin blog has become disconcertingly common, for reasons that a cultural theorist like Walter Benjamin would perhaps be hard pressed to explain. I used to think this obsession was mine alone. Women’s Brains on Steroids?! WUT!?
Sci got an email from one of her lovely readers recently about an article that appeared in Scientific American. I usually have a lot of respect for Scientific American, but I have to say I feel they really dropped the ball on this one. So today, I present to you: what Sci Am said, the REAL story, and WTF is up with that.
Let's take it from the top. Women's Brains on Steroids: Birth control pills appear to remodel brain structure wooOOOooo. That poor attractive girl with a confused look. Are you scared yet? It seems that weekly we hear about some professional athlete who sullies himself and his sport through abuse of steroids. I think we can all spot the scare tactic "blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure". It gets better. OH NOES! Sigh. Ok. It's time to go to the article.
Pletzer, et al. We have known for a while that men and women show differences in brain structure. But gray matter volumes are not constant. How Can I Possibly Be Free? Raymond Tallis This essay is an attempt to persuade you of something that in practice you cannot really doubt: your belief that you have free will. It will try to reassure you that it is not naïve to feel that you are responsible, and indeed morally responsible, for your actions. And it will provide you with arguments that will help you answer those increasing numbers of people who say that our free will is an illusion, or that belief in it is an adaptive delusion implanted by evolution. The case presented will not be a knock-down proof — indeed, it outlines an understanding of free will that is rather elusive. It is of course much easier to construct simple theoretical proofs purporting to show that we are not free than it is to see how, in practice, we really are.
For this reason, the argument here will take you on something of a journey. That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Interview: Raymond Tallis. If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain's leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine.
But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein. On June 2 he is talking at the Hay festival about human exceptionalism. The mixture of medical distinction with an interest in existentialist philosophy is one of the things that makes Tallis almost unique. He is a passionate atheist who hates materialistic interpretations of our minds. In 1964 he went to Oxford to read medicine. Key texts. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 505-686 (June 2010) Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight. A stranger in half your body. An amazing study has just been published online in Consciousness and Cognition about a patient with epilepsy who felt the left half of his body was being “invaded by a stranger” when he had a seizure.
As a result, he felt he existed in one side of his body only. The research is from the same Swiss team who made headlines with their study that used virtual reality to make participants feel they were in someone else’s body, and one where brain stimulation triggered the sensation of having an offset ‘shadow body’ in patients undergoing neurosurgery. The researchers suggest that having an integrated sense of our own bodies involves three types of perception: self-location – the area where we experience the self to be located; first-person perspective – the perceived centre of the conscious experience; and self-identification – the degree to which we identify sensations with our own bodies. Patient 1 is a 55 year old, left-handed male patient suffering from epilepsy since the age of 14 years.
Illusory own body perceptions: Case reports and re... [Conscious Cogn. 2010] - PubMed result.