"psychology & consciousness" archive
Tuesday 8 February
- Criminals aren't crazy, they're evil! - Previously thinkness blogged about a very relativist trend in Europe in which psychologists are beginning to think that criminality is an a priori sign of craziness. They said this conception didn't necessary change the way we should treat criminals, but... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 164 Comments
Sunday 30 January
- Let's get together and feel alright - This very interesting account of the opening of the World Social Forum reminds thinkness of an old topic that I meant to post about. In constrasting the WSF with the World Economic forum, Samuel Loewenberg mentions that the WEF has... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 63 Comments
Tuesday 25 January
- Understanding versus sanity - thinkness just had a weird thought while washing the dishes: one can easily analyze life a little too closely, and there's some arbitrary line -- different for different people at different times -- past which we don't want to go.... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 39 Comments
Wednesday 1 September
- The chemistry and math of crime - Some Euros are saying that all people who commit crimes are, essentially, crazy. There must be some neurochemical reason why people commit these crimes, whether a psychiatrist can see the reason -- schizophrenia, battered wife syndrome -- or not --... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 147 Comments
Thursday 29 July
- How not to buy happiness - Wow. This is a fascinating article. It claims that money can buy happiness, but only if you spend it right. Robert Frank says, essentially, that there are certain things we can buy that we will soon get used to, so... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 2 Trackbacks
| 201 Comments
Tuesday 27 July
- Lose the disgust - thinkness picked up on the debate over the usefulness of disgust a couple of months ago. Now psychologists Paul Bloom jumps into the fray and says we should be over disgust (it was so hundreds of years ago). The incidents... Posted in monkey vs robot
, psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 218 Comments
Wednesday 30 June
- Intuition? Feh. - I was looking at the IMDB entry for The Fog of War and came across this snippet from a user review: My first encounter with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was in the late spring of 1966 when, as... Posted in monkey vs robot
, psychology & consciousness
| 6 Trackbacks
| 317 Comments
Thursday 17 June
- Might as well face it - New studies give further credence to the theory that being in love, as Robert Palmer said, is like an addiction. Researchers used gene therapy to change one gene in a male meadow vole -- which is usually promiscuous -- to... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 6 Trackbacks
| 4 Comments
Monday 24 May
- God gave me mad bling - Chloe writes a good defense of the movie Troy. Pretty good at convincing me, although that may not have been that difficult, as I haven't seen the movie, and the trailer seemed plenty fun enough. One thing I like is... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 4 Trackbacks
| 7 Comments
Saturday 1 May
- What are you worth? - In our society, we go through long stretches pretending that a human life is worth more than anything else in the world. But if you look at something as mundane as the decision to drive a car (as opposed to,... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 3 Trackbacks
| 7 Comments
Friday 30 April
- Where falsity enters - Mickey Kaus points out that Paul Krugman's column may conflate lying and self-deception: In doing this, Krugman attributes conscious deception to people (the Bushies) who are probably (in reality and Orwellian theory) guilty only of self-deception. This tendency--to call opponents... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 35 Comments
Thursday 29 April
- Where we are - A few years ago, a friend of mine told me, very confidently, that we were living in an era that was ruled by irony. He told me this happily, insisting that irony was a great, beautiful, and honest thing. (Was... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 3 Trackbacks
| 137 Comments
Tuesday 13 April
- The Good Life - Wow, this is a really interesting essay written by Martin Seligman, the president of the American Psychological Association. So much of interest in here; it'll take me a while to internalize much of it. Some good points: - I'm pretty... Posted in monkey vs robot
, psychology & consciousness
| 4 Trackbacks
| 91 Comments
Tuesday 6 April
- Dog bites man; teevee bites child - Recent studies show that ever hour per day of teevee that a toddler watches makes them 10% more likely to develop ADHD by age 7. This is really not very surprising at all, but it's good when those science guys... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 83 Comments
Wednesday 31 March
- Neural Darwinism - Edward Rothstein's NYTimes review of Wider Than the Sky, Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman's book about the nature of human consciousness. Rothstein gently chides Edelman for trying to shoehorn his complicated theory into a meager 148 pages; Rothstein's 2-page summary of... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 155 Comments
- Neuromarketing marketing - Douglas Rushkoff, in his blog (thanks for the pointer, Chun), takes another whack at neuromarketing, which I posted about in October, and the NYTimes then quickly yanked away. (I'm not putting it back, dammit!) He spends a minute saying that... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 9 Trackbacks
| 119 Comments
Saturday 27 March
- Orgasmatron has arrived! - Remember that part of Woody Allen's Sleeper when Woody hides (alas, by himself) inside the Orgasmatron, the device that couples use in the future to have clean, no-contact, antiseptic sex? Well, they're getting close: The [Slightest Touch] stimulates the nerves... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 144 Comments
Thursday 4 March
- Consciousness components - Alfred North Whitehead, renowned English philosopher and mathematician, broke human consciousness down into 'Instinct, Intellect, and Wisdom.' I like that.... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 7 Trackbacks
| 192 Comments
Sunday 29 February
- Sympathy through war - Oy, it's been a long time. Gurp. A couple weeks ago I saw The Fog of War, Errol Morris' amazing documentary about Robert McNamara. One thing in particular struck me. Over the past few weeks and months I have been... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 0 Trackbacks
| 250 Comments
Thursday 15 January
- Risky assumptions - The Globe Ideas section did a story on risk assessment a few weeks ago [I know, haven't blogged in a while]. Essentially, the risk assessment folks set a price tag on human life based on how much money people will... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 229 Comments
Monday 5 January
- Cheering for Lindh - David Edelstein, the Slate movie reviewer, has a spookily incisive point about The Last Samurai: "...The Last Samurai, in which remorseful Native American killer Tom Cruise joins forces with another mystical tribe, the samurai, against the genocidal American capitalist conglomerate... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 106 Comments
Monday 22 December
- Scientist prematurely writes off philosophy - As you may have noticed, I am currently in the throes of trying to figure out exactly how to steer this blog. [This question tightly parallels an investigation of what I will study next year in school, and, perhaps consequently,... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 13 Trackbacks
| 184 Comments
Monday 24 November
- The Rashomon Effect - I'm reading this interesting book called The Hungry Gene by Ellen Ruppel Shell, which is about the biological causes of obesity. The subtitle of the book is actually 'The inside story of the obesity industry'. Either that's really misleading or... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 296 Comments
Friday 24 October
- Neuromarketing gonna get your mama - Jeezus. Neuromarketing is well underway already, brought to my attention only by this great NYTimes Mag story. Basically, marketers are starting to look at actual brain activity to see what people -- i mean, consumers -- like, and how to... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 2 Trackbacks
| 368 Comments
Tuesday 23 September
- Woof, God. Woof. - Interesting bit from an interview with biologist John Maynard Smith in the 14 June 2003 New Scientist. He mentions religion in animals, and I have been thinking a lot recently that animals probably are religious. 'NS: Perhaps your best-known work... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 1 Trackbacks
| 183 Comments
Monday 22 September
- Puddin' - 'The proof is in the puddin' -- one of my favorite phrases of all-time. I'm going to immediately start getting into some of the ideas I want to steer toward in this new incarnation of thinkness, so as to show... Posted in language
, monkey vs robot
, psychology & consciousness
| 7 Trackbacks
| 166 Comments
Tuesday 19 August
- Psycho-sociolitics - The Voice ran a great story by Michael Gecan about four people who happened to be at Yale University at the same time -- Clinton, Rodham, Bush, and Dean -- and the sociology at Yale and how these different personalities... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 3 Trackbacks
| 409 Comments
Wednesday 6 August
- The Matrix: here at last - The transhumanists are organizing. Police in Florida have launched a new database incorporating information from a bunch of different sources, and they happily decided to call it Matrix [take the blue pill!]. This could be one of those moments that... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 3 Trackbacks
| 196 Comments
- Scientific Americans - In a great story in the Chronicle Review, British philosopher of science David Papineau says, "Where Continental philosophy sets out to rival science, and North American philosophy aims to cooperate with it, contemporary British philosophy sits uneasily on the fence."... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 9 Trackbacks
| 163 Comments
Thursday 10 July
- Tickle thyself - This New Scientist article in part addresses that age-old question: Why can't people tickle themselves? I guess it's not that hard to figure out -- it's what I've thought for years: You know what's about to happen. But this study... Posted in psychology & consciousness
| 19 Trackbacks
| 84 Comments