Month: October 2016
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Back to school… After school… [OR: Why gods admire. Why humans try to understand]
Doctoral students in the sciences are more like the rest of us than previously thought: They don’t know what they want to do with their lives, either. So, when confronted with the choice of what to do with their newly minted doctorates, they tend to keep marching in a straight path, to pursue postdoctoral research…
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Doing nothing. Up in the clouds. [Being vs. Living]
A man who wrote a magazine about doing nothing. A man who actually stopped working in order to do nothing. A man who discovered beauty within nothingness… “Slowing down to appreciate clouds enriched his life and sharpened his ability to appreciate other pockets of beauty hiding in plain sight. At the same time, Pretor-Pinney couldn’t…
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Brain, Bayesian reasoning, hallucinations, schizophrenia, obstacles…
By weaving together expectations and information gleaned from the senses, the brain creates a story about the outside world. “The brain is a guessing machine, trying at each moment of time to guess what is out there,” says computational neuroscientist Peggy Seriès. Guesses just slightly off — like mistaking a smile for a smirk —…
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Babies imitating. Not.
For decades, there have been studies suggesting that human babies are capable of imitating facial gestures, hand gestures, facial expressions, or vocal sounds right from their first weeks of life after birth. But, based on new evidence, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 5, 2016 now say that just isn’t…
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