BQDaily Links

Friday, October 29, 2010

• Why Do We Love to Scare Ourselves?

  FoxNews.com

  What in your brain separates the pleasurable adrenaline high of a horror film from the traumatizing experience of someone breaking into your house?

• Very Religious Americans Have Higher Levels of Well-Being Than the Rest of the Country

  CNN

  The most religious Americans show the highest levels of well-being as measured by factors ranging from physical and emotional health to self-evaluations of life to perceptions of work environment, according to a Gallup report.

• Astronomers Estimate That Our Galaxy Has Tens of Billions of Planets With a Size and Mass Like Earth

  The Washington Post

  Their observations and extrapolations say nothing about whether these Earth-size planets will have the characteristics of Earth: its density, a distance from the sun that is just right for liquid water, the fact that it is a rocky structure rather than a gaseous ball. But Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley said that with so many Earth-size planets now expected to be orbiting distant suns — something on the order of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 across the universe — the likelihood is high that many are in “habitable zones” where life can theoretically exist.

• How the Dalai Lama Became an Icon

  CNN

  Arri Eisen: My theory is that at the moment the world is especially starved for authentic leaders. People to believe in. There’s almost an innate need, it seems, for someone to make us see our true potential as human beings, someone who can help guide us to what we believe, how we decide the right thing to do, someone who walks the talk.

• You Are Not Your Brain

  13.7: Cosmos and Culture

  Alva Noë: My own view is that the you-are-your-brain conception is dead wrong and that the best, new biology of consciousness supports this idea that the mind is not in the head. We need to get out of our heads to understand ourselves. For we are not brains in vats of skull, we are animals, dynamically entangled with the world around us. Where do you stop and where does the world around you begin? Not at the skull, and not even at the limits of the body.

• The Neuroscience of Magic

  Scientific American

  “Most of the cognitive illusions out there have been created by magicians. So we can really benefit a lot by using their insights and learning their techniques to accelerate discovery in cognitive neuroscience,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist with the Barrow Neurological Institute.

• What the Pope Told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

  CNN

  Benedict specifically praised — and blessed — science and scientists. But he also made clear that part of the role of science is to reveal God in the universe. “Scientists do not create the world; they learn about it and attempt to imitate it,” he said. “The scientist’s experience as a human being is therefore that of perceiving a constant, a law . . . that he has not created but that he has instead observed,” the pope said. That perception, in turn, “leads us to admit the existence of an all-powerful Reason, which is other than that of man, and which sustains the world.”

• Q&A: Robert Putnam

  Houston Chronicle

  Robert Putnam says the idea that religion is the province of conservative Republicans has caused a record number of young Americans to shy away from organized religion. But the Harvard University political scientist, best-known for 1995’s Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, said his new book also found Americans to be surprisingly tolerant of beliefs that differ from their own.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

• How Do Our Brains Focus on Something?

  Wired

  By measuring the activity of single neurons, researchers have recorded what happens when people narrow their focus on subjects like Josh Brolin or Marilyn Monroe. The neuroscientists weren’t interested in the actors, however, but rather the dynamics of attention.

• The 1000 Genomes Project

  The Wall Street Journal

  An international consortium of scientists says it has identified and catalogued the vast majority of genetic variations among people, a huge step toward the ultimate goal of mapping nearly all such differences in humans’ biological blueprints.