Another very cool overflight video from the ISS, if you can tune out the Michael Bay soundtrack.
Archive for the Science Category
Is the Internet Making You Less Creative?
Posted in Clips, Science, Writers, Writing on February 1, 2012 by frankbures
In the current issue of Poets & Writers is a story that was long in coming, on an issue my friends are tired of hearing me harp on: information overload. Obviously, I’m not the first person to write about this, but my concern is not only about the annoyance of dealing with too many data streams. Rather, it’s about the cumulative effect that the constant intake is having on the deeper, more mysterious processes in the mind. Namely, I am concerned about creativity.
Two recent pieces in the New York Times have gotten at this same point. In Pico Iyer’s The Joy of Quiet, he writes that, “Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.” In Susan Cain’s piece on the New Groupthink and the cult of collaboration, she writes that “solitude is a catalyst to innovation,” and that “Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process.”
This concern is something in the air, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Recently, a friend posted Henry Miller’s Commandments from 1933, the first of which is, “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” And D.T. Suzuki wrote in his 1953 introduction to Zen in the Art of Archery, “Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.”
For those of us who value solitude it’s a concern that has taken on a new urgency. I don’t pretend to have any answers, but this new piece explores the issue in what I hope is a new way. For example, while there is much talk of “attention” these days, and a growing awareness of its importance, there has been very little discussion of the fact there are different kinds of attention. We have two neurologically distinct attentional systems which work at cross purposes: Focused attention and distracted attention. Which one are you using right now?
The following are my thoughts, along which those of a handful of other writers, on how to keep your inner space alive when the outer one keeps pressing in. As Zadie Smith recently advised,”Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.”
The story can be found here:
You Are Not So Smart
Posted in Books, Clips, Science on January 19, 2012 by frankbures
We don’t always know what we think we know. Confirmation bias (your brain’s tendency to cue into, or seek out, information that confirms opinions you already have), the Dunning-Kruger effect (your overestimation of your competence), subjective validation (your tendency to believe vague, positive predictions) – each of these unlocks some quirk of the human mind, some way in which we misperceive the world.
In his entertaining new book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Gotham, 2011), journalist David McRaney has collected such well-established theories – many of them culled from his blog of the same.
Best Book of the Year, 2011
Posted in Books, Science on January 2, 2012 by frankbures
This book will not be on anyone’s year-end list. It will not be a bestseller. It will be ignored by scientists and New Agers alike. It will not be read by anyone who believes we basically know what we need to know about the world. Trying to ask hard questions about strange things can be a dangerous walk along a narrow path with Richard Dawkins and the materialist fundamentalists wagging their fingers on one side and a pile of Heaven’s Gate corpses on the other.
Yet Steve Volk shows artfully that it can be done, and in Fringe-ology we find a place in the middle for rational, considered exploration of the things we do not yet understand, a space like the one neuroscientist David Eagleman wants to see carved out. Despite its unfortunate title, Fringe-ology is a rational book, a bold book, an honest book, a humble book, and a book that is not afraid to say when things are ludicrous, when they aren’t and–most importantly–when we simply don’t know.
Rare Earth
Posted in Science, Video on November 18, 2011 by frankburesVery cool set of videos from the Space Station, which you may have seen but are worth seeing again. List of locations can be found here.
Babble On: The Origins of Language?
Posted in Books, Clips, Science on October 31, 2011 by frankbures
Once upon a time, humans could not hold conversations or sing songs together. Now we chatter incessantly, not only with speech but also through text messages, tweets and status updates. How we transformed into the highly social species we are today remains the subject of many theories.
Two competing hypotheses center on whether our capacity for language is an innate skill that 
grew stronger through natural selection or whether we lacked any such ability and instead trained our brains to collect new information using objects and sounds in our environment. In his new book Harnessed, Mark Changizi stakes out the middle ground: cultural—not natural—selection explains our language ability.
Is Your President Insane? Why you’d better hope so
Posted in Books, Clips, Science on September 26, 2011 by frankbures
In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was chosen to run as the democratic vice-presidential nominee under George McGovern in the race against Richard Nixon. But it soon emerged that Eagleton suffered from depression and had received shock treatment for it. A scandal erupted, and Eagleton stepped down, forming a cloud that still hovers over politics today.
Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi thinks the public is mistaken in wanting leaders who appear sane and mentally healthy. In A First-Rate Madness, he proposes that Eagleton may have actually been the best candidate to deal with a national crisis because of, not in spite of, his depression.
The crux of Ghaemi’s argument is that people who are depressed exhibit what psychologists have dubbed “depressive realism.”
Sound Mind: A Life of Listening
Posted in America, Art, Clips, Science on July 4, 2011 by frankbures
In the summer issue of Tufts Magazine is a story about Doug Quin, an acoustic ecologist and sound designer who has recorded everything from the bizarre clacking of Arctic walrus tusks to the psychedelic whistling of Weddell seals, to the disappearing song of the kagu birds of New Caledonia. Quin even provided the sounds for Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World and has produced many albums from his field recordings, most recently Fathom, released on the Tiaga label in three colors of vinyl. (It’s mostly sold out, but you can hear a sample of the Weddell seals here, down at Taiga 11.)
What I loved about this story, though, was how it reminded me (and, I hope, readers) that the world of sound is as big and fascinating and important as the world of light. It reminded me how, with a small shift in consciousness, we can access that world. Each year Quin helps people do this by leading sound walks in Central Park at the GEL Conference. But you don’t have to go there for that. All you have to do is step outside, open your mind, and listen:
“It was early morning, and Doug Quin and I were headed out on a winding ribbon of road leading away from Syracuse, to a patch of wild tucked between upstate New York farms. Next to me, the bearded, soft-spoken Quin, a polyglot with just a hint of an unplaceable accent, looked ahead into the darkness. We could see very little at that time of day, which was exactly what we wanted to see.
Quin and I were headed into strange territory, a place where you’ve likely never been, but where Quin spends much of his time. It’s a world connected to ours, but often invisible to it. It’s also a world that’s changing—and being changed—as fast as any part of the planet. Quin, who has been called the Audubon of audio, is a musician and artist and, most recently, a professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. But his work always leads him back there, to the place he calls the soundscape, a place he has been exploring, recording, sifting through, and archiving for the past twenty-five years, from rare patches of rainforest to the ice at the end of the earth, to his own backyard.”
Against Happiness
Posted in America, Clips, Science on May 3, 2011 by frankbures
Are you tired of all the stories about happiness? The books, the science, the lists of the happiest places and people on earth? Do you have the sneaking suspicion that it’s all a lot of superficial nonsense? This month, in The Rotarian, I wrote a piece celebrating a long-neglected, much-maligned state: unhappiness. Since I filed that piece a few months ago, other stories have appeared along the same lines.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported on research at the UW- Madison into the difference between eudaimonic well-being (greater life purpose) and hedonic well-being (pleasure or positive feelings). The results are pretty stark: In one survey of people with an average age of 80, those who had greater eudaimonic well-being were less likely to have mobility problems, half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and 57% less likely to die over a five year-year period. Other researchers found the happiest countries, and the happiest U.S. states, also have the highest suicide rates. Coincidence? I suspect not.
I am not against happiness per say. Sometimes I even enjoy it. What I am against is the fetishizing of happiness, and the expectation that we should be happy all the time. I resent what Joan Didion quotes anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer as calling, “the ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” which arose during the 20th century. In my experience, a more accurate view seems to be that life is a series of ups and downs, an undulation between happiness and unhappiness. Sometimes the reasons for these feelings are clear. Other times they aren’t until years later. But without accepting this, we risk doing all kinds of unwise things during the down times, as well as missing a chance to take what they have to offer. One theory claims that depression is not caused by a distorted view of reality, but by a too accurate one. Others think depression serves the evolutionary purpose of making us focus on a problem that needs to be addressed. Yet the fact that life is not always fun does not mean it’s not worth living. And the fact that it can be very hard, does not mean that it can’t also be very be good. In fact, I think it means precisely the opposite: There’s more to life than just being happy.
The essay is here: The Pursuit of Unhappiness
Under Pressure: The Science of Anxiety, Fear and Stress
Posted in America, Books, Clips, Science on April 27, 2011 by frankbures
“What is the most common mental health issue in America? You might be tempted to say depression. But you would be wrong.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anxiety disorders now take the top spot, with 18 percent of Americans suffering from one. In his new book Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool, journalist Taylor Clark begins by highlighting our extreme levels of anxiety, writing that the average high school student today has the same anxiety level as a psychiatric patient did in the 1950s and that Americans are five times as likely to suffer from anxiety as Nigerians, who arguably have more to fear.
Clark does not spend much time speculating on how we became a society awash in worry. He does something perhaps more significant—he clarifies what anxiety is and how we can treat it. There is, Clark says, a “nervous trinity” that can wreak havoc on our minds: anxiety, fear and stress.”
