The musical brain (human and avian)
The World Science Festival, held in New York earlier this summer, has produced a couple of enjoyable videos that illustrate the power of music. Here, Bobby McFe...
Category: Thinking Meat Project
Posts from my blog the Thinking Meat Project (2006–2018)
Humans and climate change
So here I am back on the blog again. To jump back in with both feet, how about I write about climate change? Recently I ran across this press release about the ...
Book review: Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are
Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, by Daniel Nettle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 I have to confess that I’ve felt an irrational attach...
Brainsong
If you could translate your brain waves into music, what would it sound like? Would the sounds indicate anything meaningful to you? Some recent work published i...
The world looks different
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I seem to remember that Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina includes two strikingly different descriptions of journe...
Let your mind wander
The very idea of a mind wandering suggests that the wandering mind is off course, aimless, or somehow gone astray. However, it might be more accurate to suppose...
Baby minds and unconscious minds
I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news art...
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...
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...