How Trees Calm Us Down In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results seemed at once obvious—of course a leafy tableau is more therapeutic than a drab brick wall—and puzzling. That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. Are such numbers fanciful? What is most interesting about this data, though, is one of its subtler details. In the late nineteenth century, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James proposed a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” attention.
Amazing video shows us the actual movies that play inside our mind Upon rereading the entire article it does appear that the second clip shown to the subjects was fully reconstructed by what was learned from the brain in the first mapping session. That is fucking incredible. Agreed. That's just so incredible. It's not perfect, obviously, but who cares?! They reconstructed what a person was seeing! Actually, I think it's sort of the opposite of the headline, which is completely misleading us here. Researchers have used (invasive) sensors in the brain to reconstruct the images that lab animals were seeing, actually creating an image that represented an approximation of what they saw; however, that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. It's really impressive, but that's exactly what's not going on.
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months | Books For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other. When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. This story never happened. I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? The article did not provide any sources. I was bursting with questions.
Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. The meters with two-syllable feet are IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbersSPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! Adam Had'em. Here are some more serious examples of the various meters. iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables) That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables) Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables) And the sound | of a voice | that is still dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl) This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks A note on the source.
Flash-Lag Effect - D. M. Eagleman This is a page of supplemental information for D. M. Eagleman and T. J. Sejnowski, Motion Integration and Postdiction in Visual Awareness, Science, 287(5460), 2000, and for follow-up Technical Comments. Eagleman, D.M. & Sejnowski, T.J. (2000) Motion integration and postdiction in visual awareness. The goal of this line of research is to close in on a connection between physical mechanisms present in neural tissue and the perceptual functions that these mechanisms embody. "Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward" - Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard (Please note: this page is not currently maintained, and has not been updated since 2007) The flash-lag effect is a visual illusion wherein a flash and a moving object that appear in the same location are perceived to be displaced from one another (MacKay, 1958; Nijhawan, 1994). Scroll down to watch demonstrations of the stimuli we used to elucidate several aspects of the flash-lag phenomenon. Dim lights Embed
Orion Magazine - Speaking of Nature A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Tiptoeing in her mud boots, Caroline skirts around a crumbling family plot to veer into the barberry hedge where a plastic bag is caught in the thorns. We have a special grammar for personhood. For me, this story began in another classroom, in another century, at the Carlisle Indian School where my Potawatomi grandfather was taken as a small boy. So, bit by bit, I have been trying to learn my lost language.
Hyperbole and a Half At around midnight last night, it started snowing. A lot. I got absurdly excited about it. I was like "Ohmigoditssnowingletsgoforawalkrightnow!!!!" And Boyfriend was like "It's 12:30 AM..." and I was like "So? We need to go to the grocery store anyway." My point is that after staring at me in silence for a few long moments in which I am sure he questioned some of his life decisions, Boyfriend was like "Fine." So Boyfriend got all bundled up while I checked to make sure everything was unplugged because I didn't want the house to catch on fire while we were gone and then I got dressed while Boyfriend sat on the couch in his snow-clothes looking like he was on some sort of detonation timer and if the timer went off we would no longer be allowed to go for a walk, so I put my hat and gloves on really fast and then I was like "I'm ready!" Boyfriend wanted to stop and take pictures of the snow and the pretty lights, but I was so excited that I took off running: Not open. And this is what I did:
Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It? | Science Not Fiction Update 5/24/11: The conversation continues in Part II here. I recently gave a talk at the Directors Guild of America as part of a panel on the “Science of Cyborgs” sponsored by the Science Entertainment Exchange. It was a fun time, and our moderators, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from the HowStuffWorks podcast, emceed the evening with just the right measure of humor and cultural insight. In my twelve minutes, I shared a theory of how consciousness evolved. My point was that if we understand the evolutionary basis of consciousness, maybe this will help us envision new ways our consciousness might evolve further in the future. That could be fun in terms of dreaming up new stories. This idea is so simple that I’m surprised I’ve not yet been able to find it already in circulation. The idea is this: back in our watery days as fish, we lived in a medium that was inherently unfriendly to seeing things very far away. So what does this have to do with consciousness?
How Time Crystals Could Rewrite The Rules Of Physics If you overheard someone talking about time crystals in a bar, you’d think they were mad, or drunk. Or both. These things, theoretically, oscillate for eternity without any energy input whatsoever — and if that sounds like a perpetual motion machine, it’s because it is. Impossible, right? But what if it was a Nobel prize-winning physicists making the suggestion? Because that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in. When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organise themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. In other words, he’s saying it must be possible to create a crystal that has regular, time-varying motion going on inside — without any energy being dumped into the system. Fortunately, he has at least one team of researchers on his side. The only problem is that progress is slow: the Berkeley researchers have admitted that the project could take “anywhere between three and infinity years” to complete. Picture: Kostov/Shutterstock
Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. Neuroscientist Kathleen McDermott of Washington University began by quoting famous memory researcher Endel Tulving, who called our ability to remember the past and to anticipate the future “mental time travel.” Tellingly, not only can he not recall the past, he can’t envision the future. Alas, they couldn’t.