NYT on “destination memory,” why it’s so hard to remember if you told that story already to someone or not. “The main finding by Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod — that destination memory is relatively weak — helps explain several embarrassing, and annoying, kinds of social interaction… The study authors concluded that outgoing information ‘was less integrated with its environmental context — i.e., the person — than was incoming information.’”
Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity (via.) Previously.
Geoengineering going mainstream.
Boston magazine has a long profile of MIT Media Lab professor Hugh Herr, who builds artificial limbs that in many ways exceed human capacity. “We as humans sometimes believe the human form is the most beautiful,” Herr says. “But there’s clearly form and structure that is beautiful and non-human. You attach machines to the body and there’s an obsession to make it humanlike. That’s from people being ashamed of having a machine attached to the body. I want that robotic look to be absolutely gorgeous.” Previously: Building the Body Better.
Abstract art’s emotional resonance can be measured. Neuroscientists in Liverpool study how shapes in art like Malevich’s Supremus No. 50 and Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow activate the part of the brain linked to visual information. Say a researcher: “[The] artists start with a blank canvas and arrange shapes and colours in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, using their own brain to monitor the effect. We like to look at the human body or parts of the body like the face and hands, stylised representations like stick figures and organic forms of the kind incorporated into the work of Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon. Certain landscapes and horizontal and vertical lines are also popular because they resonate with our visual systems, which have been tuned by evolution and experience to respond particularly to these biologically and socially important stimuli.”
Soldiers Who Have Taken a Life More Likely to Defend Iraq War
Spike Lee is set to direct a biopic on Ron Mallett, the African American UConn physics professor, who in his spare time conducted basement experiments hoping to eventually develop a time machine. Mallett, by the way, is completely aware his interest seems crazy to an outsider. I had tears in my eyes when he appeared on This American Life last year. Mallett’s motivation was to see his father again, (who died when he was ten — around the time he was getting into sci-fi comic books.) His autobiography is Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.
Some afternoon natural ambient music: the sound of pulsating stars. Listen here.
The Economist reviews Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History starting with the anecdote on the curious habits of 19th century polymath Francis Galton, who would “estimated boredom levels by counting fidgets; in Africa he used a sextant and tape-measure to calculate the proportions of the buttocks of a “Hottentot” woman from afar. Galton also created a “beauty-map” marking every woman who passed as, “attractive, indifferent or repellent.” Davis’ book also discusses obsession as a creative tool, “And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity.”
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