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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPSClues to Why We Dream at All ... In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.” Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.” ...
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POPSConcrete that literally eats pollution. If it works, then this could be a big breakthrough indeed. However, it's not like cities are going to start re-paving roads that don't need it, or demoing & rebuilding building, (or even just repainting them with this solution)... The cost would be prohibitive. So that 50% savings (just off of 15% of concrete surfaces) is a LONG way away. Plus, this definitely doesn't curb the need for changing the way we pollute...
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POPSNever Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
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POPSSongs From The Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words Dr. Horace Dobbs, a leading authority on dolphin-assisted therapy, has joined the team as consultant. "I have long held the belief that the dolphin brain, comparable in size with our own, has specialized in processing auditory data in much the same way that the human brain has specialized in processing visual data. Nature tends not to evolve brain mass without a need, so we must ask ourselves what dolphins do with all that brain capacity. The answer appears to lie in the development of brain systems that require huge auditory processing power. There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. We an therefore hypothesize that the dolphin's primary method of communication is picture based. Thus, the picture-based imaging method, employed by Reid and Kassewitz, seems entirely plausible."
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POPSOn Architecture and Elegance bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance—holding, spanning, sheltering—with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. From philosophical historian Alain de Botton's inimitable The Architecture of Happiness , itself a paradigmatic illustration of the aesthetic elegance of well-engineered minimalism (be it architectural or textual). The NYRB's synopsis of de Botton's work makes note of this: The simplicity of his writing is not the product of a simple mind.... In The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) he remarked that "there are...no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax."
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