PURETICS...

What Happened?????????

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:28:00 +0000

The Idea Of Pleasure

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:15:00 +0000

Everyone desires to reach a stage of absolute happiness where he is all the time happy. This is defined as a state of NIRVANA which supposedly brings you to an ultimate state of pleasure.

But the terms pleasure and misery cannot be absolutely defined. It is because they are relative terms. To explain this through an example, let us take an example of a man who is accustomed to have stale bread as his daily meal. If his diet is suddenly changed to something like biryani which is better in taste, he will feel a pleasure. His degree of pleasure is in direct proportion to the degree of improvement in the taste of the food. If he is offered still better food, his pleasure increases further and if one day, it is suddenly continued to supply him with stale bread, he will feel misery. This is because, he has obtained a knowledge of something which enhances his pleasure.

On the other hand, if stale bread is the only available food on earth, the terms pleasure and misery will be meaningless as there is no scope for relative comparison. Even if the supply of a wonderful meal is continued over a long period, without any variation in tastes, a man will be bored, as the feeling of pleasure can be derived only through comparison.

Considering another example, if a man feels he is good looking, it is only in comparison with people who are not as good looking as he. If he is sad in this aspect, it is because of people who are better looking than him.

So, a world of absolute happiness is a world where all people are identical in appearance, have equal intelligence as difference in intelligence will again give rise to certain complexes, and in proportion to the difference, degrees of pleasure and misery will begin to surface. Also everyone should have equal power and artistic abilities. To sum up, each and every individual's tastes, behavior, appearance, intelligence and capacity of doing work must be same as each and every other individual.

As everyone will be having the same thoughts, there will be no need for speaking with each other, and as every one will have the same abilities, there will be no question of anyone getting interested in anyone. It is a world devoid of competition and initiative. In short, this world will be of the LIVING DEAD.

‘Cage fights’ And Students

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:43:00 +0000

Dallas: A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.
The principal of South Oak Cliff High School, Donald Moten, was accused by several school employees of sanctioning the ‘cage fights’ between students in a steel equipment enclosure in a boy’s locker room, where “troubled” youth fought while a security guard watched, according to the confidential March 2008 report first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
Such fights occurred several times over the course of two years, the report said.
Moten, who resigned from the district in 2008 while under investigation in connection with
a grade-changing scandal, denies the cage-fight accusations. “That’s barbaric,” he told The Dallas Morning News. “You can’t do that at a high school. You can’t do that anywhere. It never happened.”
But investigators with the district’s Office of Professional Responsibility gathered testimony from two employees at South Oak Cliff High who said they had witnessed students fighting in the cage from 2003 to 2005, among others who heard about the fights.
One employee overheard Moten tell a security guard to take two students who had been at each other for days and “put ’em in the cage and let them duke it out,” the report states, and the practice was so embedded in the school’s culture that one student remarked to a teacher that he was “gonna be in the cage.”
Moten is a former police officer who lied about being kidnapped at gunpoint to get out of work, for which he was given administrative leave. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Social Change @21Cent.........

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:42:00 +0000

The critics of modernity, going back at least to the 19th century, have told us that modern society is hurtling forward, its social ties unraveling behind it, its citizens left unhinged and bewildered. In recent decades, disintegration has remained a persistent image in popular social criticism, from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Philip Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness (both published in 1970) to more current entrants such as Judith Warner's 2005 book Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. And now comes the sociologist Dalton Conley tapping into the same trope and, like many before him, presenting the crisis of contemporary society as bearing most sharply, indeed almost exclusively, on the privileged.

The trouble with this long tradition, and particularly with Conley's rendition of it, is that the evidence doesn't support the view that modernity has disoriented all groups in society, much less that it has peculiarly shaken up the privileged. Despite the pervasive image of a postmodern self, fragmented and fractured, the educated have found new ways to knit their lives together. It is the less educated, squeezed on every front, whose lives have become more insecure and unstable in both work and family life.

A professor at New York University, Conley has important articles and books to his credit, and much of his work deals critically with social inequality. His Being Black, Living in the Red is a substantial study of the sources and consequences of racial differences in wealth. The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why is an intriguing analysis of the limited role of genes and family background in accounting for achievement, highlighting instead the role of luck, accident, and the inability of parents with many children to provide opportunities to all of them.

In contrast to his earlier work, however, Elsewhere, U.S.A. is a disjointed dervish of a book that embodies its author's diagnosis of modern life. It is frenetic, disorganized, marred by leaps of logic and digressions galore. Its saving grace is that it challenges us to understand how contemporary social transformations affect the realms of personal life: love, friendships, the sense of self. But to grasp those connections, we have to pay attention to facts that Conley dismisses or ignores.

Amid a welter of kvetchy asides (Conley hates advertisements on movie screens, logos on T-shirts, and people who yak on their cell phones in public), Elsewhere, U.S.A. offers two big concepts to diagnose modern society's ills: the "elsewhere" society, and the "intravidual." "Mrs. and Mr. Elsewhere," workaholic professionals, always feel they should be somewhere else than where they currently are, and so they betray those around them as their mind races ahead to the next encounter, or they look around for a more desirable interaction. The intravidual is the reciprocal of this dissociated society: Rather than an integrated self, the modern person is internally fragmented.

Along with these two big concepts, Conley emphasizes four forces that drive contemporary social change. New technologies create a 24/7, sped-up work life that continuously intrudes on family time. Growing income inequality makes those near the top envious and insecure, leading them to work ever harder. Women's participation in paid work erodes community life, breaks down the boundary between work and leisure, and strains families. And the networked society permits an almost infinite number of selves -- virtual and actual -- as people participate in multiple communities of varying depth and reality, from the anonymous others who "recommend" films on Netflix, to friends of friends on Facebook, to the avatars in virtual social universes.

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Bicameral Mind--Interview With Gregory Cohran

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:48:00 +0000

2Blowhards: Julian Jaynes -- thoughts? Reactions? And what about that "bicameral mind" idea?

Gregory Cochran: I read Jaynes' book years ago and thought at the time that he was deeply, entertainingly crazy. Nowadays, it seems likely that people have changed enough over recorded history to generate noticeable personality differences. That doesn't mean I buy his bicameral mind model: just the idea that people now may have significantly different minds from people then.

2B: One visitor thinks that "the best way to test Jaynes' ideas would be to study some of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon and New Guinea and see if they are still of 'bicameral' mind." Has anyone bothered to do this?

GC: If someone really believed in bicameralism -- some non-Nebraskan -- sure. I wouldn't myself.

2B: From another reader: "[You say that people will cling to the Blank Slate myth as long as it pleases them to.] The Catholic Church reluctantly stopped believing in the geocentric model of the universe long before there were important practical applications. They had an enormous investment in the geocentric model, but the empirical evidence was too strong. Are you saying that the scientific evidence against the 'Blank Slate myth' will never be strong enough, or that the motivation to cling to the myth is stronger than that for the geocentric model, or perhaps that heresies are suppressed more efficiently nowadays?"

GC: I think people -- some people -- care a lot more about this than anyone ever cared about geocentrism. There are also practical political aspects.

2B: From another reader: "Depiction of trickster gods in West Africa seems a bit positive, at worst morally neutral. In Northern Europe, Loki was a clear-cut villain. Could that contrast come from selection-induced personality differences?"

GC: And yet Bugs Bunny is our hero. I think this line of analysis is about as sound and solid as Citibank.

2B: "I have heard that the wide varieties of thalassemia are the result of reproductive isolation. If populations mixed in Italy, the best ones would be common, and the rest rare. Maybe that was from Cavalli-Sforza? But maybe malarias varied regionally, leading to regional adaptation: there is no best resistance?"

GC: There are lots of places where several hemoglobin mutations (defenses against malaria) co-exist. Modeling suggests that in some cases some variants will eventually be replaced by others, but that process can take a long time -- in some cases far longer than falciparum malaria has existed. Falciparum malaria in Italy (at least in central and northern Italy) is less than 2000 years old: there probably hasn't been time enough for the dust to settle.

2B: "An androgen receptor allele associated with male pattern baldness shows signs of strong selection in some populations. Does the difference have cognitive effects, personality affects, does it increase paternal investment, reduce intergenerational mate competition, socially-mediated personality differences? I have an uh, personal interest in this one."

GC: I have no idea. There are some interesting regional variations in the average activity of the androgen receptor, but the variant linked to baldness is different. I hadn't heard that it looks selected: do you have a reference?

2B: "You say: 'brains have shrunk about 10% over the last 30,000 years, and almost certainly changed in other ways as well.' So, why is that? Is it that we have less need for more generalized brains? Or have genes that lead to more efficient brains predominated? Can we compare brain size between hunters and gatherers (such as are left) or slash and burn types with those who live in complex societies?"

GC: Nobody knows why the human brain has shrunk. It might be increased temperature. There is some indication that the cerebellum has become relatively bigger over this period: this might be a clue. Larger populations would tend to create more mutations, and some might have led to more efficient brains: certainly any change that preserved or improved function while shrinking the brain would be highly favored. As for brain size, Eskimos have larger-than-average brains (and score higher on IQ tests than other hunter-gatherers) while Australian aborigines, Pygmies, and Bushmen have smaller-than-average brains.

2B: "So it turns out that no one has really taken a hard look at interfertility among human population groups. I can't say I'm surprised. What about interbreeding success between dogs? Are there differences? Lions can breed with tigers, but Ligers are infertile, right? So much for the interspecies question. Where intra-species breeding success is at issue, I would assume -- perhaps mistakenly -- that the question would hinge on graduated differences rather than something like on/off. This is why I wonder if there is good data regarding relatively distant dog breeds, which aren't so different from human races."

GC: Female ligers are often fertile, in accordance with Haldane's rule.

As far as I know, all human mixes ever tried have been successful, but I don't think there has been much checking of the rate of miscarriages, measurement of average fertility, etc. There might be a problem or two.

There might also be hybrid vigor. Sometimes the offspring of two particular strains of a plant or animal species are sturdier, healthier, etc than their parents: two populations that have this property with respect to each other are said to "nick." For all we know, there are ethnic groups that have never had members intermarry but would produce really formidable offspring if they ever did.

Of course, the real point of that comment was to suggest an experimental program with, say, 100 ethnic groups, that involved systematically testing interfertility (i.e. making babies) in all 10,000 possible combinations: a vast mating matrix. I would say that we know the results of only one row of that matrix; the Irish and everybody else.

2B: "Of course the elephant in the bedroom is the huge gap between average black and average white IQ. Whites had to grapple with and survive ice age conditions. Blacks didn't. That's the the thinking as to why the gap exists." In other words, is the denial of the idea that substantial differences between population groups exist finally down to people wanting to avoid the black/white IQ difference?

GC: Nobody knows the historical/prehistorical causes of the gap. As for the motivation being a desire to avoid discussing or admitting black/white differences: partly, but there are other drivers, I think.

Continue reading..

What should you do if you are confronted by a terrorist?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:34:00 +0000

Every citizen should be made to understand that offence is the best form of defense. A terrorist carrying a weapon will use it to bring maximum destruction. The fear factor induced primarily by ignorance is way too advantageous to the terrorist. This myth of an assault rifle being disastrous should be killed and we should realize that it is the man behind the weapon and not the weapon which needs to be addressed. If the man behind the weapon is weak, a state of art weapon is equivalent to that of a block of wood. Soldiers who have had occasion to demonstrate courage under fire would perhaps be the first to accept that almost no one is devoid of fear when bullets fly. An understanding of the real destructive power of the enemy, training, being in a ‘kill or be killed’ situation and the knowledge that ‘offense is the best form of defense’ is what allows soldiers to overcome their fear and do the seemingly impossible. I am not suggesting that we train every citizen to be a soldier, but if we can do just enough so that every citizen is aware of the basics of what is the real capability of the commonly used ‘terror weapons’ and if we can educate them on how to react in adverse situations, we may have done our bit. Well-trained, well-equipped and effective defence and law enforcement agencies are a definite need for any viable democratic society to overcome the scourge of terrorism. What is equally important is a very aware, educated and determined citizenry so that we are not being seen as easy prey in a soft state.

Continue...

How your brain creates God ?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:44:00 +0000

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.

This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.

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Unusual

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:30:00 +0000

Unusual blog...

Tricks Of Tears

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:10:00 +0000

I cry when I’m happy, I cry when I’m sad, I may cry when I’m sharing something that’s of great significance to me,” said Nancy Reiley, 62, who works at a women’s shelter in Tampa, Fla., “and for some reason I sometimes will cry when I’m in a public speaking situation.

“It has nothing to do with feeling sad or vulnerable. There’s no reason I can think of why it happens, but it does.”

Now, some researchers say that the common psychological wisdom about crying — crying as a healthy catharsis — is incomplete and misleading. Having a “good cry” can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone, argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Placing such high expectation on a tearful breakdown most likely sets some people up for emotional confusion afterward.

This call for a more nuanced view of crying stems partly from a critique of previous studies. Over the years, psychologists have confirmed many common observations about crying. It is infectious. Women break down more easily and more often than men, for reasons that are very likely biochemical as well as cultural. And the physical experience mirrors the psychological one: heart rate and breathing peak during the storm and taper off as the sky clears.

When asked about tearful episodes, most people, as expected, insist that the crying allowed them to absorb a blow, to feel better and even to think more clearly about something or someone they had lost.

At least that’s the way they remember it — and that’s the rub, said Jonathan Rottenberg, a psychologist at the University of South Florida and a co-author of the review paper. “A lot of the data supporting the conventional wisdom is based on people thinking back over time,” he said, “and it’s contaminated by people’s beliefs about what crying should do.”

Just as researchers have found that people tend, with time, to selectively remember the best parts of their vacations (the swim-up bars and dancing) and forget the headaches, so crying may also appear cathartic in retrospect. Memory tidies up the mixed episodes — the times when tears brought more shame than relief, more misery than company.

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Success And Ganesha A Superstar ....

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:12:00 +0000

It’s always been a mystery to me that why someone makes it in life and someone does not. It is not as simple as having talent or luck. I think it’s also a lot to do with a subconscious programming not necessarily designed or intended.

Take the example of films...Over the years I have seen umpteen examples of actors and technicians who I thought high of, who didn’t make it and who I thought were mediocre make it to the top. Not that I am an authority but at the point and time of me thinking that, everyone else around me shared the same opinion.

The most simplistic explanation for this is the S word “success”. But what does it really mean? Success is primarily an endorsement of a large number of people that so and so is very very good. But how does one know what so many people are actually thinking? A case in point is Gaddar and Lagaan. Both of them released on the same day and Gaddar is a far superior hit to Lagaan. Today years after their release I did not meet one single person who claimed Gaddar to be his favourite but you will find plenty for Lagaan. So who were the people who loved Gaddar? Did they come quietly from Mars saw the film and went back again?

Jokes apart the people who liked Gaddar most probably would be the so-called masses whose opinions would not matter to the nose-in-the-air critics and the media. So the moment they don’t endorse or keep praising the film the people who liked Gaddar also in time would slowly start being apologetic about liking Gaddar as they will be programmed to think that there is something wrong with them for liking Gaddar.

There was an aunt of mine who just accompanied someone visiting Satya Sai Baba and when she came back she put a huge portrait of his in her house and she claimed that the very fact that so many thousands believe in him is proof enough for her that he is divine. I countered her by saying that if she actually does not believe, and just because she thinks thousands others believe, she also believes, then what if each one of those thousands also were thinking the same like her. In effect this means nothing but a huge collective belief in a lie. Am not talking here about Satya Sai Baba but I am questioning the basis of their belief in him.

Also I could never understand for what reason Kartika is a lesser God than his brother Ganesha. Mythology does not say Kartika is lesser and neither did it say Ganesha is more extra-ordinary. But for some reason Heaven’s PR department propped up Ganesha and played down Kartika. So the moment they promoted Ganesha in such loud profound voices even as illogical as a story of his origin will also be looked up to by the devotees (audience) in awe (Read as in a illogical film also becoming a super-hit).

If anyone in the poor film industry were to tell a story like this the writer will be kicked out for ever. “Young Ganesha was standing guard outside when his mother Parvati is taking a bath Shiva returns and Ganesha stops him and in anger Shiva cuts off the kid’s head. (I think the world can learn a few lessons in brutality from Shiva.) And when Parvati tells him who the kid is, Shiva goes outside cuts an elephant’s head (Are the wild-life people PETA etc listening) and sticks it on his son’s head.” Apart from this and being momma’s boy I couldn’t get what else Ganesha did to get that divine status and of course we never ever bothered to ask about Kartika because we were programmed to ignore him.

For all practical purposes Kartika is better looking, seems smarter (at least he does not have any funny illogical stories around him comparable to those of Ganesha) and also there is no account in mythology of him being less powerful than Ganesha or whatever.

Then why is Ganesha a superstar and why is Kartika not?

Obama's Speech Cut...

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:58:00 +0000

First....
“Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real,” Mr. Obama said in the address, delivered from the west front of the Capitol. “They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America, they will be met.”

Second...

"whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

Third...

“Now there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” he said. “Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”

Fourth...

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,” he said, “a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly.”

Fifth..

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

Tree Frogs Are Capable Of Gravity-Defying Feats

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:36:00 +0000

Like wall-hugging geckos, tree frogs are capable of gravity-defying feats of the feet. But new research shows that the two species cling to surfaces in markedly different ways.

The "dry" grip of geckos relies on molecular bonds—firm but easily broken—between tiny fibers in the animal's toe pads and the surfaces on which they stand. But scientists found that frogs use a different approach to hold on.

Biologist Jon Barnes of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who led the research, used an atomic force microscope (AFM), which can provide images on the scale of billionths of a meter, to scan the feet of White's tree frogs. To the naked eye, the frogs' toe pads appear patterned with flat-topped, hexagonal cells surrounded by grooves filled with mucus. On closer inspection, however, Barnes discovered that the tops were not flat at all but rather were covered by tightly packed "nanopillars," each with a small dimple in the end, which generate powerful friction against the surfaces they contact.

"The AFM can also be used to measure the stiffness of the outer layer of the foot," says Barnes, who published the findings in The Journal of Experimental Biology. "It turns out to be of the same order as silicone rubber. Soft materials are important, for they allow the pad to achieve close contact, following the contours of the surface to which the frog is adhering."

Although mucus can be a lubricant, for tree frogs the substance—only 1.5 times more viscous (resistant to flow) than plain water—serves as a "wet" adhesive. The reason: the nanopillars and larger structures on the toe pads come in direct contact with surfaces. As a result, the small amount of wet mucus between these protrusions provides adhesive forces.

Tree frogs can climb most surfaces, from sheer leaves to glass, with ease, although they do not fare so well on dry, rough materials—presumably because they cannot produce enough mucus to create a continuous fluid layer beneath their pads on such a surface, Barnes says. "In support of this idea is the fact that adhesion dramatically improves if the rough surface is wet," he notes.

Walter Federle, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in England who studies adhesion, says the study sheds light on the material properties of frog toes at the microscopic level and clarifies that nanopillars play "an important role in adhesion." But he notes that the exact function of these tiny columns is still unclear.

Research on both geckos and tree frogs has tantalized materials scientists with visions of smart adhesives for human applications. For example, a paper in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface estimated that a car brake equipped with a modest patch of synthetic gecko-grip could stop a 2,200-pound (1,000-kilogram) vehicle traveling 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour in about 16 feet (five meters).

Barnes and his colleagues believe understanding the adhesive properties of tree frog feet could lead to better tire design, and perhaps even a nonslip shoe, although they first need to demonstrate that the adhesion—and, equally important, the rapid disengagement from the surface—is maintained on structures much larger than an amphibian's toe. Another possible application of the work, Barnes says, is the creation of a coating to protect nerves during surgery by holding them delicately out of the way of the scalpel.

The power of happiness

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:30:00 +0000

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.

"You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience," said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. "But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious."
One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person's emotions can influence another's -- laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.

When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.

The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.

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Future As A Present.....

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:57:00 +0000

When time came to an end, the gods decided to run a final experiment. They wanted to be prepared after the big crunch for potential trajectories of life after the next big bang. For their experiment they choose two planets in the universe where evolution had resulted in similar developments of life. For planet ONE they decided to interfer with evolution by allowing only ONE species to develop their brain to a high level of complexity. This species referred to itself as being „intelligent“; members of this species were very proud about their achievements in science, technology, the arts or philosophy.

For planet TWO the gods altered just one variable. For this planet they allowed that TWO species with high intelligence would develop. The two species shared the same environment, but — and this was crucial for the divine experiment — they did not communicate directly with each other. Direct communication was limited to their own species only. Thus, one species could not inform directly the other one about future plans; each species could only register what has happened to their common environment.

The question was how life would be managed on planet ONE and on planet TWO. As for any organism, the goal was on both planets to maintain an internal balance or homeostasis by using optimally the available resources. As long as the members of the different samples were not too intelligent stability was maintained. However, when they became more intelligent and according to their own view really smart, and when the frame of judgment changed, i.e. individual interests became dominant, trouble was preprogrammed. Being driven by uncontrolled personal greed, more resources were drawn form the environment than could be replaced. Which planet would do better with such species of too much intelligence to maintain the conditions of life?

Data analysis after the experimental period of 200 years showed that planet TWO did much better to maintain stability of the environment. Why this? The species on planet TWO had to monitor always the consequences of actions of the other species. If one would take too many resources for individual satisfaction, sanctions by the other species would be the consequence. Thus, drawing resources from the environment was controlled by the other species in a bi-directional way resulting in a dynamic equilibrium.

When the gods published their results, they drew the following conclusions: Long-term stability in complex systems like in social systems with members of too much intelligence can be maintained if two complementary systems interact with each other. In case only one system like on planet ONE has been developed it is recommended to adopt for regulative purposes a second system. For social systems it should be the next generation. Their future environment should be made present both conceptually and emotionally. By doing so long-term stabillity is guaranteed.

Being good brain scientists the gods knew that making the future present is not only a matter of abstract or explicit knowledge. This is necessary but not sufficient for action resulting in a long-term equilibrium. Decisions have to be anchored in the emotional systems as well, i.e. an empathic relationship between the members of the two systems has to be developed. If the future becomes present, it can future be a present.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:16:00 +0000

THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

We're talking about changing everything — not just our abilities, relationships, politics, economy, religion, biology, language, mathematics, history and future, but all of these things at once. The only single event I can see shifting pretty much everything at once is our first encounter with intelligent, extra-terrestrial life.

The development of any of our current capabilities — genetics, computing, language, even compassion — all feel like incremental advances in existing abilities. As we've seen before, the culmination of one branch of inquiry always just opens the door to a new a new branch, and never yields the wholesale change of state we anticipated. Nothing we've done in the past couple of hundred thousand years has truly changed everything, so I don't see us doing anything in the future that would change everything, either.

No, I have the feeling that the only way to change everything is for something be done to us, instead. Just imagining the encounter of humanity with an "other" implies a shift beyond the solipsism that has characterized our civilization since our civilization was born. It augurs a reversal as big as the encounter of an individual with its offspring, or a creature with its creator. Even if it's the result of something we've done, it's now independent of us and our efforts.

To meet a neighbor, whether outer, inner, cyber- or hyper- spatial, finally turns us into an "us." To encounter an other, whether a god, a ghost, a biological sibling, an independently evolved life form, or an emergent intelligence of our own creation, changes what it means to be human.

Our computers may never inform us that they are self-aware, extra-terrestrials may never broadcast a signal to our SETI dishes, and interdimensional creatures may never appear to those who aren't taking psychedelics at the time — but if any of them did, it would change everything.

Why do we write?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:30:00 +0000

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write–and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy–I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. Not war in the sense of a specific time of major upheaval, where historical events are experienced, such as the French campaign on the battlefield at Valmy, as recounted by Goethe on the German side and my ancestor François on the side of the armée révolutionnaire. That must have been a moment full of exaltation and pathos. No, for me war is what civilians experience, very young children first and foremost. Not once has war ever seemed to me to be an historical moment. We were hungry, we were frightened, we were cold, and that is all. I remember seeing the troops of Field Marshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seeking a passage to the north of Italy and Austria. I do not have a particularly vivid memory of that event. I do recall, however, that during the years which followed the war we were deprived of everything, in particular books and writing materials. For want of paper and ink, I made my first drawings and wrote my first texts on the back of the ration books, using a carpenter's blue and red pencil. This left me with a certain preference for rough paper and ordinary pencils. For want of any children's books, I read my grandmother's dictionaries. They were like a marvellous gateway, through which I embarked on a discovery of the world, to wander and daydream as I looked at the illustrated plates, and the maps, and the lists of unfamiliar words. The first book I wrote, at the age of six or seven, was entitled, moreover, Le Globe à mariner. Immediately afterwards came a biography of an imaginary king named Daniel III—could he have been Swedish?—and a tale told by a seagull. It was a time of reclusion. Children were scarcely allowed outdoors to play, because in the fields and gardens near my grandmother's there were land mines. I recall that one day as I was out walking by the sea I came across an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire: on the fence was a sign in French and in German that threatened intruders with a forbidding message, and a skull to make things perfectly clear.

It is easy, in such a context, to understand the urge to escape—hence, to dream, and put those dreams in writing. My maternal grandmother, moreover, was an extraordinary storyteller, and she set aside the long afternoons for the telling of stories. They were always very imaginative, and were set in a forest—perhaps it was in Africa, or in Mauritius, the forest of Macchabée—where the main character was a monkey who had a great talent for mischief, and who always wriggled his way out of the most perilous situations. Later, I would travel to Africa and spend time there, and discover the real forest, one where there were almost no animals. But a District Officer in the village of Obudu, near the border with Cameroon, showed me how to listen for the drumming of the gorillas on a nearby hill, pounding their chests. And from that journey, and the time I spent there (in Nigeria, where my father was a bush doctor), it was not subject matter for future novels that I brought back, but a sort of second personality, a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time, and this personality has stayed with me all my life—and has constituted a contradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a source of suffering. Given the slowness of life, it has taken me the better part of my existence to understand the significance of this contradiction.

Books entered my life at a later period. When my father's inheritance was divided, at the time of his expulsion from the family home in Moka, in Mauritius, he managed to put together several libraries consisting of the books that remained. It was then that I understood a truth not immediately apparent to children, that books are a treasure more precious than any real property or bank account. It was in those volumes—most of them ancient, bound tomes—that I discovered the great works of world literature: Don Quijote, illustrated by Tony Johannot; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes; the Ingoldsby Legends; Gulliver's Travels; Victor Hugo's great, inspired novels Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and L'Homme qui rit. Balzac's Les Contes drôlatiques, as well. But the books which had the greatest impact on me were the anthologies of travellers' tales, most of them devoted to India, Africa, and the Mascarene islands, or the great histories of exploration by Dumont d'Urville or the Abbé Rochon, as well as Bougainville, Cook, and of course The Travels of Marco Polo. In the mediocre life of a little provincial town dozing in the sun, after those years of freedom in Africa, those books gave me a taste for adventure, gave me a sense of the vastness of the real world, a means to explore it through instinct and the senses rather than through knowledge. In a way, too, those books gave me, from very early on, an awareness of the contradictory nature of a child's existence: a child will cling to a sanctuary, a place to forget violence and competitiveness, and also take pleasure in looking through the windowpane to watch the outside world go by.

Shortly before I received the—to me, astonishing—news that the Swedish Academy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by Stig Dagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essays entitled Essäer och texter. It was no mere chance that I was re-reading this bitter, abrasive book. I was preparing a trip to Sweden to receive the prize which the Association of the Friends of Stig Dagerman had awarded to me the previous summer, to visit the places where the writer had lived as a child. I have always been particularly receptive to Dagerman's writing, to the way in which he combines a child-like tenderness with naïveté and sarcasm. And to his idealism. To the clear-sightedness with which he judges his troubled, post-war era—that of his mature years, and of my childhood. One sentence in particular caught my attention, and seemed to be addressed to me at that very moment, for I had just published a novel entitled Ritournelle de la faim. That sentence, or that passage rather, is as follows: "How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if nothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail to see that wherever one looks, people are struggling against hunger and will necessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the end of the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a new paradox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he now discovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure to take notice of his existence." (The Writer and Consciousness)

Continue reading..

New Conscious Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:40:00 +0000

Spiritual exploration and the debunking of religion were other features of the 60s that people have tended to either ridicule or denounce, but we seem to be revisiting those themes as well. Before the presidential campaigns kicked into high gear, David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay called "The Neural Buddhists." In it he called arguments defending the existence of God against atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins easy, and predicted that the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."

The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego. Such ideas, of course, are part of a much broader interest in "mysticism" and "spirituality," themselves, perhaps ironically, markers of that quintessentially modern and eminently democratic turn to the individual as the most reliable source of religious authority and insight.

Significantly, the modern, Western use of those terms — mysticism and spirituality — arose in the middle of the 19th century at the exact moment that science, in the form of an ascending Darwinism, was first seriously challenging institutional religion. This, of course, is a cultural war that is still very much with us in the present debates around religion and science, belief and atheism, creationism and evolution. Add to that volatile mix the violent terrorism of radical Islam, the likely role of modern technology and carbon-burning fuels in global warming and the environmental crisis, and the ability of institutions and governments to monitor our thoughts and words in extraordinarily precise and effective ways, and you have all the ingredients for ... what?

What do neural Buddhists, individualist spiritualities, cultural wars over science and religion and creationism and evolution, a nature-hating technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and potentially omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were all core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

Perhaps not coincidentally, a kind of Huxley renaissance is under way. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brave New World is being made into a film, to be directed by Ridley Scott and produced by George DiCaprio, starring his son, Leonardo. New editions of Huxley's books are in the works, and serious global interest in his writing is on the rise, particularly in Eastern Europe. It is worth returning to Huxley, then, not as he has been for us in the past — the author of the prophetic, dystopian Brave New World — but as he might be for us in the future.

Huxley was an iconic literary figure who embodied many of the tensions and coincidences of our contemporary intellectual scene, particularly those orbiting around those warring twin Titans, science and religion. On the scientific side, Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the great English defender of Charles Darwin — winner of the first great cultural war over religion and science — and the man who, in 1869, coined the word "agnosticism." Other than Darwin himself, T.H. Huxley, a biologist, probably did more than anyone else to lay the cultural foundation for our present scientific worldview. The results, as is well known but not always admitted, were devastating for traditional religious belief. W.H. Mallock captured the tone in 1878: "It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing," he wrote. "One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying." One can only guess what Mallock would say now.

Aldous's older brother was Sir Julian Huxley, a well-known evolutionary biologist. Sir Julian thought that there is "one world stuff" that manifests both material and mental properties, depending upon whether it is viewed from without (matter) or from within (mind). The mental and the material aspects of reality, in other words, are two sides of the same cosmic coin. Aldous would arrive at a nearly identical position, drawn not from science but from comparative mysticism, and described in his still popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). His primary inspiration seems to have been Advaita Vedanta, a classical Indian philosophy that captured much of elite Hindu thought and practice in the 19th century and subsequently influenced the reception of Hinduism among American intellectuals and artists in the 20th.

But Huxley was suspicious of gurus and gods of any sort, and he finally aligned himself with a deep stream of unorthodox doctrine and practice that he found running through all the Asian religions, which, he proclaimed in Island (his last novel, published in 1962), was a "new conscious Wisdom ... prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra." That worldview — which Huxley also linked to ancient fertility cults, the study of sexuality in the modern West, and Darwinian biology — emerges from the refusal of all traditional dualisms; that is, it rejects any religious or moral system that separates the world and the divine, matter and mind, sex and spirit, purity and pollution (and that's rejecting a lot). Put more positively, Huxley's new Wisdom focuses on the embodied particularities of moment-to-moment experience, including sexual experience, as the place of "luminous bliss."

Read more..

Darwinian Dating........

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:27:00 +0000

Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide. By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?

In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

The cultural muddle is at its greatest when the dinner check arrives. The question of who grabs it is a subject of endless discussion on the hundreds of Internet dating sites. The general consensus among women is that a guy should pay on a first date: they see it as a way for him to demonstrate interest. Many men agree, but others find the presumption confusing. Aren’t the sexes equal? In fact, at this stage in their lives, women may well be in a better position to pick up the tab: according to a 2005 study by Queens College demographer Andrew Beveridge, college-educated women working full-time are earning more than their male counterparts in a number of cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis.

Continue reading..

Magic Of Magicians...Trick Or Science?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:40:00 +0000

Magicians consider the covert form of misdirection more elegant than the overt form. But neuroscientists want to know what kinds of neural and brain mechanisms enable a trick to work. If the artistry of magic is to be adapted by neuroscience, neuroscientists must understand what kinds of cognitive processes that artistry is tapping into.

Perhaps the first study to correlate the perception of magic with a physiological measurement was published in 2005 by psychologists Gustav Kuhn of Durham University in England and Benjamin W. Tatler of the University of Dundee in Scotland. The two investigators measured the eye movements of observers while Kuhn, who is also a magician, made a cigarette “disappear” by dropping it below a table. One of their goals was to determine whether observers missed the trick because they were not looking in the right place at the right time or because they did not attend to it, no matter which direction they were looking. The results were clear: it made no difference where they were looking.

A similar study of another magic trick, the “vanishing-ball illusion,” provides further evidence that the magician is manipulating the spectators’ attention at a high cognitive level; the direction of their gaze is not critical to the effect. In the vanishing-ball illusion the magician begins by tossing a ball straight up and catching it several times without incident. Then, on the final toss, he only pretends to throw the ball. His head and eyes follow the upward trajectory of an imaginary ball, but instead of tossing the ball, he secretly palms it. What most spectators perceive, however, is that the (unthrown) ball ascends—and then vanishes in midair.

The year after his study with Tatler, Kuhn and neurobiologist Michael F. Land of the University of Sussex in England discovered that the spectators’ gaze did not point to where they themselves claimed to have seen the ball vanish. The finding suggested the illusion did not fool the brain systems responsible for the spectators’ eye motions. Instead, Kuhn and Land concluded, the magician’s head and eye movements were critical to the illusion, because they covertly redirected the spectators’ attentional focus (rather than their gaze) to the predicted position of the ball. The neurons that responded to the implied motion of the ball suggested by the magician’s head and eye movements are found in the same visual areas of the brain as neurons that are sensitive to real motion. If implied and real motion activate similar neural circuits, perhaps it is no wonder that the illusion seems so realistic.

Kuhn and Land hypothesized that the vanishing ball may be an example of “representational momentum.” The final position of a moving object that disappears is perceived to be farther along its path than its actual final position—as if the predicted position was extrapolated from the motion that had just gone before.

More Tools of the Trickery Trade
Spectators often try to reconstruct magic tricks to understand what happened during the show—after all, the more the observer tries (and fails) to understand the trick, the more it seems as if it is “magic.” For their part, magicians often dare their audiences to discover their methods, say, by “proving” that a hat is empty or an assistant’s dress is too tight to conceal a second dress underneath. Virtually everything done is done to make the reconstruction as hard as possible, via misdirection.

But change blindness and inattentional blindness are not the only kinds of cognitive illusions magicians can pull out of a hat. Suppose a magician needs to raise a hand to execute a trick. Teller, half of the renowned stage magic act known as Penn & Teller, explains that if he raises his hand for no apparent reason, he is more likely to draw suspicion than if he makes a hand gesture—such as adjusting his glasses or scratching his head—that seems natural or spontaneous. To magicians, such gestures are known as “informing the motion.”

Unspoken assumptions and implied information are also important to both the perception of a trick and its subsequent reconstruction. Magician James Randi (“the Amaz!ng Randi”) notes that spectators are more easily lulled into accepting suggestions and unspoken information than direct assertions. Hence, in the reconstruction the spectator may remember implied suggestions as if they were direct proof.

Psychologists Petter Johansson and Lars Hall, both at Lund University in Sweden, and their colleagues have applied this and other magic techniques in developing a completely novel way of addressing neuroscientific questions. They presented picture pairs of female faces to naive experimental subjects and asked the subjects to choose which face in each pair they found more attractive. On some trials the subjects were also asked to describe the reasons for their choice. Unknown to the subjects, the investigators occasionally used a sleight-of-hand technique, learned from a professional magician named Peter Rosengren, to switch one face for the other—after the subjects made their choice. Thus, for the pairs that were secretly manipulated, the result of the subject’s choice became the opposite of his or her initial intention.

Intriguingly, the subjects noticed the switch in only 26 percent of all the manipulated pairs. But even more surprising, when the subjects were asked to state the reasons for their choice in a manipulated trial, they confabulated to justify the outcome—an outcome that was the opposite of their actual choice! Johansson and his colleagues call the phenomenon “choice blindness.” By tacitly but strongly suggesting the subjects had already made a choice, the investigators were able to study how people justify their choices—even choices they do not actually make.

The Pickpocket Who Picks Your Brain
Misdirection techniques might also be developed out of the skills of the pickpocket. Such thieves, who often ply their trade in dense public spaces, rely heavily on socially based misdirection—gaze contact, body contact and invasion of the personal space of the victim, or “mark.” Pickpockets may also move their hands in distinct ways, depending on their present purpose. They may sweep out a curved path if they want to attract the mark’s attention to the entire path of motion, or they may trace a fast, linear path if they want to reduce attention to the path and quickly shift the mark’s attention to the final position. The neuroscientific underpinnings of these maneuvers are unknown, but our research collaborator Apollo Robbins, a professional pickpocket, has emphasized that the two kinds of motions are essential to effectively misdirecting the mark. We have proposed several possible, testable explanations.

One proposal is that curved and straight hand motions activate two distinct control systems in the brain for moving the eyes. The “pursuit” system controls the eyes when they follow smoothly moving objects, whereas the “saccadic” system controls movements in which the eyes jump from one visual target to the next. So we have hypothesized that the pickpocket’s curved hand motions may trigger eye control by the mark’s pursuit system, whereas fast, straight motions may cause the saccadic system to take the lead. Then if the mark’s pursuit system locks onto the curved trajectory of the pickpocket’s hand, the center of the mark’s vision may be drawn away from the location of a hidden theft. And if fast, straight motions engage the mark’s saccadic system, the pickpocket gains the advantage that the mark’s vision is suppressed while the eye darts from point to point. (The phenomenon is well known in the vision sciences as saccadic suppression.)

Another possible explanation for the distinct hand motions is that curved motions may be perceptually more salient than linear ones and hence attract stronger attention. If so, only the attentional system of the brain—not any control system for eye motions—may be affected by the pickpocket’s manual misdirection. Our earlier studies have shown that the curves and corners of objects are more salient and generate stronger brain activity than straight edges. The reason is probably that sharp curves and corners are less predictable and redundant (and therefore more novel and informative) than straight edges. By the same token, curved trajectories may be less redundant, and therefore more salient, than straight ones.

Detail on topic..

The Teasing Gap

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:32:00 +0000

A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.

As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”

Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”

And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

Continue reading..

Is it strange for boys to play with dolls?

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:49:00 +0000

Is it strange for boys to play with dolls? Even for parents who generally shun gender stereotypes, the idea of a boy playing with his dolly seems slightly off. But why?

In a humorous essay for Mothering , Joel Troxell struggles with his wife’s insistence on buying a doll for their one-year-old son Nathan. Though the doll is gender-neutral in shape and dress, Troxell feels the need to compensate for this “affront to his masculinity” by telling Nathan that the doll is actually an operative for the US military, and his neutral facial expression means he’s impervious to fear or pain.

Nathan quickly grows tired of the doll, much to his dad’s secret delight. A few months later, however, Nathan’s mom is back at it, looking for bigger and better dolls. Troxell’s “daydreams of Nathan going first round in the NFL draft [are] replaced by disturbing images of him walking across the stage at graduation, sucking his thumb and carrying his doll.”

The author finds that doll play is still associated with outdated gender roles in his mind. He thinks of playing with dolls as childcare practice for girls (a.k.a. future moms and wives), and toy weapons as encouraging boys to develop the hunting skills they’d need to provide for their families.

Eventually, Troxell learns the benefits of boys with dolls: They teach compassion, sensitivity, and responsibility, as well as a practical knowledge of things like holding and feeding a baby. So in reality, Troxell’s wife points out, giving a boy a doll is giving him practice as a good father and a good person who is ready to care for others.

To the kid, his dolly may later be a source of future embarrassment, much like those ubiquitous naked-in-the-tub pictures. But if the values imbued through playing with a “girl’s toy” hold up, he’ll likely have grown to be well-adjusted enough not to care.

Click..

Mumbai Horror--Criminals are not born, they are made

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:37:00 +0000

Criminals are not born, they are made. What made him turn into a terrorist? Every question of this nature has only one answers - Injustice?I am myself constantly trying to understand this.

1) These 19 year-olds could have been brain-washed. In fact, in any army, many soldiers are brain-washed to "kill-kill-kill". Killing does not come naturally to ordinary soldiers.

2) So the question is, what motivates these brain-washers? A sense of injustice (rightly or wrongly) felt. They find brain-washing young 19 year-olds as an easy way out.

Sure, life is unjust. M.K. Gandhi fought injustice by peace, but did the British leave India because of M. K. Gandhi, or the Indian Army created by Subhash Chandra Bose, or a combination of the two?

The way we are going, I think a nuclear war is imminent, then radiation may kill half the world's population, then the world will come to it's senses for about then next 100 years or so, till it is forgotten. After that, history repeats itself.

What are the chances that a mad world leader with a terminal illness and an atomic bomb, will decide to order his brain-washed 19 year olds to use that bomb?

Or we find Mars or a new galaxy inhabitable, and migrate over there. Suddenly, the world will seem small to the material minded people, and we may live happily for the next 1000 years. People won't fight over galaxies, since there will be plenty to pick. Or even then, to keep up with the Jones, people will kill each other for percieved prized galaxies?

World As I See.....

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:49:00 +0000

You see with the sense of your sight, you hear with the sense of your hearing, you feel with the sense of your touch and all these senses are nothing but the functions of your mind which is nothing but a thought and an idea.

When you close your eyes and go to sleep the world ceases to exist and it comes back to you when you wake up in the morning and it comes back in different shapes and forms to every living being on the planet. It follows that each and every one of us have our own world which cannot be really seen or experienced by anybody else no matter how close they are to us.

This world of each of us is made up of a combination of our own individual experiences, sensibilities and our knowledge and intelligence levels, however small, big and different they might be.

So my world is nothing but a collection of my own feelings and thoughts and ideas and it will be a fallacy for me to think that anybody else can really appreciate them at least in the way I meant them. At best I can hope for a few others to connect to some of my thoughts in their own individual ways.
So as long as I am sure that no one really can understand what I stand for, what is the point of even attempting to make them understand?

Money for me ...........

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:17:00 +0000

Money for me has always been a means and never an end. The important point of money is to identify what you want to do with it. Do you want to make money to secure it, buy properties and leave it for your off-spring or do you want to use it for what you wanted it for?

My grandfather was obsessed with saving money. For hours he used to explain about some recurring deposit scheme or some such thing where if you put Rs.1 Lakh how it will become Rs.5 Lakhs in 7 years and this he used to tell to a person who does not think beyond that day, namely me.

Also there was a cousin of mine Shiva whose father was very rich but used to lead a life style of not even taking his car out, always used to keep it under a tarpaulin cloth and travel in a bus.

One day I asked him what is the point of having money if you don't use it for having a better quality of life. He answered saying that if his grandfather and father thought the same then he probably would not have had any money. I answered 'fine if you grandfather works hard saves and saves and gives it to your father and then he saves and saves and gives it to you and then you save and save give it to Raja and then he saves and saves and gives it to his son and what if Raja gives birth to a son like me. All the earlier four generations will become super big fools, Ha Ha!'

Money for me is potential energy and has no meaning unless it is made kinetic.

I would think in a very simplistic way on a philosophical level the origin of money could be explained in this way. When men in the primitive times used to hunt they were like all other animals. Hunt, eat, sleep, hunt again would have been the cycle.

And some time one among them has an idea of agriculture as in wanting to grow a crop. Now others might not understand or share his vision but he will need them to work for him on the crop. So to compensate them for working for his vision which could go wrong or right was where money has been invented and he pays them with that.

So with the money they got, it becomes their energy which they could choose to make it kinetic in whichever way they individually choose to. But again to enjoy money you first need to enjoy the experience of living a life and also to be able to identify what all life's shop can offer you. For instance you can buy the greatest music system that a shop can offer but you can't buy from life's shop a mind which can actually relish the music which plays from it. That mind, you have to have yourself. If not, having money will just amount to securing yourself fearing poverty or to feel a sense of elation in comparison to others who have lesser money than you. Thus it becomes nothing but a measurement for your own self esteem.

If you have a beautiful rich house others will admire especially those who live in the same street, but you yourself will take it for granted in not more than one day after the interior décor is done and from then on you will be only looking at its faults. Also if you have issues with your wife, the same house will look like a horror house from your point of view as you are approaching it after your days work.

Any way before you guys take off on me on this, the point I am trying to make is that no materialistic things like a music system, a car, a house etc can really give you pleasure unless it enhances the pleasure of your own personal feelings with regard to them in one way or the other.

If you are with a person who bores you it won't make a difference if you are sitting in the JW Marriott Coffee Shop and if you are interested in the person a roadside tea shop also will do wonders.

The point of life is to relish your feelings and money can make a point if and only it helps you achieve that.

I don't care for people who want to make money just to save it as I don't understand the point of trying to prepare for losses and death right from the time of being born. Then what's the point of being born?

Ideas and feelings are the only true wealth anyone can really possess and on that account I have always been rich and I will always be, that is at least for myself. Whether that achieves anything in others perception or not it's not my concern as like I said a million times before "I live for myself".

The Art Of Genius

noreply@blogger.com (Ajay) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:38:00 +0000

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

Via-The New Yorker