The colors of people
Yesterday I heard an excellent talk on the evolution of skin color by Nina Jablonski of Penn State. She started by describing how little work there was on the s...
Author: Mary
What is feeling good good for?
A recent EurekAlert article describes some work that examined the effect of positive and negative emotions on a person’s level of adherence to typical cul...
When good things don’t register
A recent experiment at Ohio State, described in this story from Science Daily, looked at how depressed and nondepressed people view positive and negative things...
Real people, fictional people
Characters in novels, movies, and other fictions can seem quite real (we root for one and boo another, for example, and cry sometimes when one of them dies). Ye...
Virtual reality between the ears
I’m reading Adam Bede, by George Eliot, and I’ve noticed that she opens several chapters with an invitation to the reader to view a scene as she des...
Songs that call up memories
A friend recently sent me a link to a Pandora station he had created and thought I might like. That got me started exploring Pandora (an Internet music service ...
Book review: iBrain
iBrain: Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. If you are looking for a good b...
The joys of nostalgia
I have always been prone to nostalgia, even when you would have thought I was too young for it. It’s easy to regard this tendency as a character weakness;...
Antikythera Mechanism rebuilt
OK, this story is a bit off-topic for this blog, but it’s just too cool not to post. The Antikythera Mechanism, a 2100-year-old device that calculated and...
Does crying help?
The other day I was struggling with a particularly difficult editing assignment, and when I took a break, I said to a friend that it was so frustrating it made ...