Big Think

Testing Our Moral Convictions: Decriminalising Possessing Child Porn To Reduce Child Crime

Tauriq Moosa — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:27:56 -0500

Last time, in the introductory post, I suggested that evidence is more important than outrage. Outrage indicates how outraged individuals want the world to be; evidence tells everyone how the world is. Too often, we let outrage guide us; for too long, we let positions with negative social ...

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Globalization Fears That Drive Political Discourse

An Phung — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What is the Big Idea? The backlash against U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra’s political attack ad is coming from all sides, including those in his own party. For those who missed it, the ad slams incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow’s foreign economic policies and depicts a young Asian ...

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Lessons To Learn From China's Not-So-Big Spenders

An Phung — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What is the Big Idea? In a recent trip to a Costco in Manhattan, shoppers were seen pushing around large shopping carts filled with items like family-sized jars of mayonnaise and bulging packs of fluffy, colorful tube socks. Moms navigated congested aisles with their screaming children and ...

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Why David Hockney Went Back to Nature

Bob Duggan — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:01:03 -0500

“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture , “because there’s the infinite there, meaning you can’t think it up.” That film captures Hockney painting many of the amazing landscapes that ...

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How to Become More Creative

Orion Jones — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:28:07 -0500

What's the Latest Development? First, stop searching for the creativity formula. When Steve Jobs was designing Pixar's office space, the computer graphics company he founded between gigs at Apple, he wanted to locate the building's only bathrooms in a center atrium, forcing people to interact ...

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Sleepy or Drunk? You're Ready to Problem Solve!

Orion Jones — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:37:52 -0500

What's the Latest Development? In a scientific study, college students were asked to solve a brain teaser early in the morning and late at night to measure problem solving abilities relative to alertness levels. Prior to answering the riddle, most students self-identified as night owls, implying ...

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How Positive Thinking Keeps You Healthy

Orion Jones — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:15:00 -0500

What's the Latest Development? It is no coincidence that you feel more energetic and relaxed when you are thinking positively, or that you feel lazy and tired if you are thinking negatively. Hormones secreted by the body, which are then carried into the blood stream, greatly affect how we feel ...

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Why Our Brains Love Powerful Music

Orion Jones — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:47:02 -0500

What's the Latest Development? Thanks to his research into the emotional content of music, British psychologist John Sloboda might say he has a unique understanding of tonight's Grammy awards. In a study, Sloboda asked music lovers to identify the parts of a song they thought to be the most ...

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Women Would Lead a More Peaceful World

Orion Jones — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 09:15:51 -0500

What's the Latest Development? Were more women in positions of political power, the Earth would be a more peaceful place, says former secretary of defense Joseph Nye. Referencing Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's latest book, Nye says women's evolutionary role in society has emphasized skills ...

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Brains Are Automatic, But People Are Free

Megan Erickson — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What's the Big Idea? Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it ...

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New Metaphors (& Gene Therapy) Will Beat Cancer

Orion Jones — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:00:00 -0500

What's the Latest Development? Steve Jobs paid $60,000 to have his tumor genetically sequenced. Today, a machine can do it for $1,000. This kind of dramatic advance, which has made sequencing more widely available, has shown us that individual genetic therapies can beat certain kinds of cancer ...

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THE “SLIPPERY SLOPE” ISN’T SLIPPERY: IT’S POT-HOLED, GRAVELLY, AND LITTERED WITH DEBRIS and SPEED BUMPS

Pamela Haag — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:06:58 -0500

The “slippery slope” is a popular argument in the same-sex marriage debate. Where do you draw the line, opponents argue? If you start allowing marriage between people of the same sex, then why not require that the law recognize threesomes, group marriage, incest, beastiality, and polygamy? Can ...

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Have Scientists Found HIV's Achilles' Heel?

Orion Jones — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:34:53 -0500

What's the Latest Development? A team of Japanese scientists have discovered a way to circumvent one of HIV's most potent defense mechanisms. The discovery involves a family of chemical compounds known as pradimicin A1 which stick strongly to the exterior coating of the HIV virus, called mannose ...

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Heart Disease Tied to Y Chromosome

Orion Jones — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:45:00 -0500

What's the Latest Development? In a survey of 3,000 British men, scientists have found an important link between a particular version of the Y sex chromosome and heart disease, meaning the predisposition to illness is passed down from father to son. Researchers found that 90 percent of the men ...

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Support African Americans for Humanism

Adam Lee — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:28:51 -0500

As NPR recently reported, there's a high price to pay for being a black atheist in America. African Americans who come out of the closet as nonreligious may be cut off by their own families, may be labeled a "race traitor" or an "apostate", or accused of lacking morals or having "holes in their ...

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Sugar Coating: What Your Doctor Really Prescribes

Orion Jones — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0500

What's the Latest Development? A new Harvard study calls into question our assumption that medicine is one of the most honest professions. In a survey of 1,900 doctors from across the country, 55 percent said they had been overly optimistic about a patient's prognosis and 10 percent said they ...

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Good Health Is Knowing How to Eat

Orion Jones — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:17:44 -0500

What's the Latest Development? Health experts, including a Harvard nutritionist, believe a healthier body is achieved by concentrating on how we eat, not just the kinds of food we consume. Called 'mindful eating', the practice has its roots in Buddhism and is catching on in some surprising ...

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Will the Supreme Court Rule on Same-Sex Marriage?

Robert de Neufville — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0500

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2010 district court ruling that California’s Proposition 8 forbidding same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. It was the first time a federal appeals court had overturned a state law against same-sex marriage. In the majority opinion ...

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The Crazy Cat Lady, Explained

Daniel Honan — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Why do people hoard pets? Psychologists have explained the phenomenon as arising from early childhood experiences. Animals are often stable fixtures in an otherwise dysfunctional life. Yet what if your cat makes you even more dysfunctional? An evolutionary biologist named Jaroslav Flegr argues ...

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Clean Water is the Best Prophylactic

Daniel Honan — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"The most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor," Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler observe in their recent book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Demographers have found alarming birth rates in the developing world, and it is linked to what Diamandis and Kotler call the ...

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