Does everyone else picture Andy Samberg when they read about Pirola too?? Isn’t everyone reading about the hot new variant, Pirola (BA.2.86/JN.1), these days?? The concern with Pirola is that it’s so different from the other strains that it’s unrecognizable to our immune system, and it’s as if we’ve never been vaccinated.
Continue readingTag: Neuroscience
A Puff of Absurdity: On Hearing Others
Louis Cozolino’s beautifully written book on neuroscience has an explanation near the end about our necessary interconnectedness. Communication from one body part to anther happens when messages throughout our body are transmitted by neurons, but the transmission doesn’t happen inside the neurons but between them, in the synaptic gap that separates the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. Well, he added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Faulty Wiring
We’re hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere longterm. Short-Term Wiring For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Covid and the Brain
Two slightly different takes from lengthy threads on how the brain operates in such a way that makes it ignore Covid risks as it protects us from the trauma caused by Covid risks: First, career coach Lisa Petsinis outlined how we think about Covid and why we aren’t acting on it. In
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Menakem’s Somatic Therapy Approach to Anti-Racism Work
Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands came highly recommended. The title refers to the effect that being enslaved had on his grandmother, and Menakem traces the violence of racism through the specific perspectives of people on either end of racial conflicts. Beyond just explaining how racism affects all of us in
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Where is My Mind? On Freud and Neuropsychology
Freud got some things right, and this isn’t a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It’s a lot like Aristotle’s science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It’s still pretty impressive how far they got as they
Continue readingScripturient: The Long Read Lost
“What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace,” wrote Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, in her book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World (Harper Paperbacks, 2019). It’s the sequel to her previous
Continue readingScripturient: The slow death of reading
To me, one of the most depressing stories to come out of 2018 was posted in The Guardian, last August. Its headline read, “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.” Its subhead reads, “When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Syndrome “E” – The Neuroscience of Evil
Why do people do evil actions? How does one get from being an ordinary citizen to someone who oversees the genocide of their neighbours? What are the psychological states that premeditate acts of violence on the personal and societal level? Noga Arikha is a historian who has looked into
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Science Behind How Nature Changes Your Brain
Talking a walk amongst plants is good for you in many ways, but why? This questions recently bothered some neuroscientists and they set out to answer it. It turns out that exposure to nature changes the way blood flows in our brain in a way that makes us feel better.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Restorative Justice and Neuroscience
In this TED talk, Daniel Reisel examines how neuroscience backs up the (already obvious) reasons that restorative justice works better than punitive justice.
Continue readingDeath By Trolley: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
I am currently reading Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Authored by Cognitive Scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this book asks 1) What do major lines of Western philosophical thought assume about the mind? 2) What has cognitive science learned about the
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: ALEC Climate Change Denial Model Bill Passes in Tennessee
alec-exposed-600x400_0 (2).jpg The month of March has seen unprecedented heat and temperatures. A rational thinking, scientifically-grounded individual could only posit, "Well, hmm, I bet climate change has something to do with the fact that in Madison, WI, it is 80 degrees in mid-March. Sometimes it's 60 or 70 degrees colder
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