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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.

Library Research Service TACTILU | Postscapes Warszawa, Poland ◥ panGenerator is a mutlidsciplinary new media design and art group (@barszczewski, @kgolinski, @jkozniewski and Krzysztof Cybulski) "Just get in touch" TACTILU is a project that uses a combination of Bluetooth, your smartphone, and a unique sensor and actuator system to remotely transmit touch between two people. Developed for the ITAKA Foundation Centre for Missing People by the design group panGenerator and the Warsaw Cheil office, the bracelet is a research prototype created using a 3d printed enclosure, an Arduino pro mini, and a combination of 5 nitinol springs and quantum tunneling composite technology (QTC) to control the sensor and actuator touch system between the two people. You can watch the prototype in action in the video below or visit the product page at: Pangenerator.com/#projects/project-tactilu for more details. Additional: Atmel, Fashioning TechImage Credits: Cheil / ITAKA Foundation, Pan GeneratorRelated: Pillow Talk, Good Night Lamp, RingU

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation “This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said.

Libraries Aotearoa - Libraries Aotearoa Virtual Reality - Notes on Blindness 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.

SLANZA Menstruation Machine (Sputniko!) - Design and Violence From the curators: With Menstruation Machine, Sputniko! explores the relationship between identity, biology, and choice, while also probing the meaning of gender-specific rituals. The accompanying video is about Takashi, a young man who wants to understand on many levels, including the physiological, what it feels like to be a girl. Takashi builds the Menstruation Machine and wears it out on the town with a girlfriend, strutting around a shopping mall and occasionally doubling over in pain. The menstrual machine is the machine that produces all that is living. Menstrual blood leaks from a uterus, in developed primates at least. To hack is to infect, to overtake one program with another, one purpose, or trace, or path, with another.

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.