Description:
Exploring what it means to be thinking matter
Contents:
Echoes of ancient minds in Turkey
Two recent news stories give us an evocative look back at human societies in Turkey thousands of years ago. This article from Smithsonian.com describes the ongoing excavation of a site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. The site, which features a series of stone circles made of megaliths erected around 11,000 years ago (roughly 6,000 years [...]
Religion and visual perception
You’ve probably heard about the ways that culture can affect visual processing; for example, research into how Westerners and Asians view a scene has tended to show that the former are more focused on key elements that are central to the scene, while the latter look more at the entire picture. Also, an individual’s visual [...]
Make a joyful noise
Or listen to a joyful noise, anyway. Recent research suggests that listening to music that makes you happy may be good cardiovascular hygiene, with a positive effect on not only mood but also the endothelium, the lining of the blood vessels. Following up on an earlier study that found that laughter was linked to blood [...]
Gene expression and behavior
Why do animals behave as they do? Well, to some extent, humans and other social animals do what they do because of certain inborn preferences and strengths and weaknesses. However, DNA is not a blueprint set inflexibly at conception or birth; it influences behavior, but gene expression also responds to cues from the environment, and [...]
Perceiving three dimensions
Sometimes humans bemoan the fact that we really can’t grasp what a fourth spatial dimension would be like: we can’t truly picture a hypercube the way we can a cube. True enough, but on the other hand, we take for granted the ability to perceive three-dimensional objects, which actually requires some extremely complex processing. This [...]
Metaphor, or literal description?
We often use temperature metaphors to describe humans and human interactions (out in the cold, warm-hearted, cold fish, warm the cockles of my heart). Two recent studies indicate that such expressions may go beyond verbal comparisons to capture a literal physical response.
The first study used two different experiments to examine the link between feelings of [...]
Thinking Meat roundup
While I’ve been busy editing and writing and getting the yard ready for next spring, a number of good Thinking-Meat type stories have appeared in the media. So without further ado, here’s a selection of links to articles for your weekend reading pleasure.
Slate examines the moral and social dimensions of the evolutionary psychology behind why [...]
Humans: A work in progress
It’s easy to think that human evolution might be at or nearly at a standstill. After all, doesn’t modern life remove many of the pressures that shaped our genome? It does, of course, but that doesn’t mean that everyone survives childhood and lives to reproduce successfully. This article from Seed magazine discusses some of the [...]
I can’t imagine it
I’ve always liked an epitaph supposedly used by Epicureans in ancient Greece: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not mind.” It expresses a benign resignation toward the inevitability of death as part of the natural cycle. And although it’s written in the form of a statement by a dead person, the [...]
Possible benefits of compassion meditation
I’ve heard the meditation practices of Buddhism described as a sort of toolkit for improving the quality of life, and in the past few years I’ve blogged a few stories about the mental benefits of meditation. Those were mostly about forms of meditation that emphasize calm concentration, which may improve the ability to focus the [...]
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