March 2010
36 posts
As Above, So Below: Magnets Can Manipulate... →
Magnetic fields targeting the moral center of the brain could scramble our sense of right and wrong.
Magnets can alter a person’s sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard…
What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about... →
quantumpossibility:
Seeing vivid visual hallucinations is an experience described in almost all human cultures. Painted hallucinatory images are found in prehistoric caves and scratched on petroglyphs. Hallucinatory images are seen both when falling asleep and on waking up, following sensory deprivation, after taking ketamine and related anesthetics, after seeing bright flickering light, or on...
Major_Project: ‘The writer twists language, makes... →
‘The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from the perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion - in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people… This is, precisely, the task of all art and, from colours…
How the Brain Stops Time (Psychology Today) →
psychotherapy:
One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It’s a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren’t keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of...
“Concepts can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to...”
– Ramesh Balsekar (via arsvitaest) (via enormousair) (via crashinglybeautiful)
“Man may deceive himself, may think that his knowledge grows and increases, that...”
– P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe (via touba) (via crashinglybeautiful)
“Whatever takes form is false. Only the formless endures. When you understand The...”
– Ashtavakra Gita (via oceanofmind) (via adams-kissiah) (via thisworldwemustleave)
“the political task today is not to posit a certain identity in opposition to...”
– Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (2001, p. 171) (via thestrain) (via praxismakesperfect) (via fyeahsocialism) (via ontologicalterrorist) (via embody) (via thisworldwemustleave) (via notational)
How Did Humans Become Empathic? →
psychotherapy:
Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps.
First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways of rearing their young, plus forms of pair bonding - sometimes for life. This is very different from the pattern among fish and reptile species, most of which make their way in life alone. Pair bonding and rearing of young organisms increased their survival and was...
What the Fibonacci series sounds like →
bobulate:
Alex Ross in The New Yorker (subscriber only) on composer Iannis Xenakis who translated parabolic shapes into music, working out his musical and visual ideas side by side:
He drew ruled parabolas on graph paper, then translated the shapes into music, mapping them as expanding web of glissandos. (The Beatles roughly echoed that effect in the orchestral crescendos of “A Day in the...
“ “Cultural conditioning is like software, but beneath the software is the...”
– Terence McKenna, Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality (via amiquote)
I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am...
reluctantbuddha:
Kahlil Gibran
“Remarkably enough, the reason you are so disturbed about the facts of life that...”
– Franklin Jones (via immortalityproject) (via boringboringboring)
