Couldn’t have said it better myself.
In fact, just read a NewScientist story about how our brains thrive right at the edge of chaos:
CHAOTIC thinking is rarely a recipe for success, but evidence is emerging that operating at the edge of chaos may drive our brain’s astonishing capabilities.
I definitely see a connection between these two items.
Stuff that found me today
Links for March 24th through March 26th:
Obviously, we know the number 9 is special. Find out why other people also think so.
I can’t ever get enough of this kind of thing.
(Via portland ground: A.A. Auto Repair – Chevron Specialty – Garage Storage – Ghost Sign.)
Zuk draws on Leslie Aiello’s concept of ‘paleofantasies,’ stories about our past spun from thin evidence, to label the nostalgia some people seem to express for prehistoric conditions that they see as somehow healthier. In my research on sports and masculinity, I frequently see paleofantasies come up around fight sports, the idea that, before civilization hemmed us in and blunted our instincts, we would just punch each other if we got angry, and somehow this was healthier, freer and more natural (the problems with this view being so many that I refuse to even begin to enumerate them). It’s an odd inversion on the usual Myth of Progress, the idea that things always get better and better; instead, paleofantasies are a kind of long range projection of Grumpy Old Man Syndrome (’Things were so much better in MY day…’), spinning fantasies of ‘life before’ everything we have built up around us.
Interesting setup for an article that goes beyond the traditional rhetoric we find ourselves wrapped up in.
Just have to love it when animals use tools.
via new scientist
As many of you know, CitAC is a dangerous and violent militia group dedicated to preventing and reversing many forms of “change” (as their name implies: Citizens Against Change). They seem to think that all the problems we encounter as humans have arisen from the blind rush into the future, and that all solutions must therefore be found in the past.
NINE has had a few run ins with CitAC in the past, but it now seems that they are moving outside their comfort zone and selling recruitment/membership gear online!
I just thought I should duly warn all my readers about this.
Contextuality, its symbolic value seems to be getting some scientific props.
Kristian Tylén from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and colleagues wanted to know which part of the brain was used to understand the meaning behind items placed in a symbolic manner. They used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they viewed pictures of everyday objects arranged to communicate meaning, such as flowers left on a doorstep, followed by the same objects in less meaningful settings, such as flowers growing in the wild.
The symbolic arrangements prompted more activity in regions associated with verbal communication, such as the left fusiform gyrus, used in reading, and the inferior frontal cortex, linked to semantic meaning (Brain and Language, DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.07.002).
Less conventional arrangements, like an art installation, also affected a “verbal” area – producing a pattern of brain activity previously associated with unusual verbal metaphors.
Previous research shows that the brain processes body language and facial expressions in a similar way to verbal communication. “It shows that language is more than just the processing of words – it pervades many of our activities,” says Tylén.