Author: Mr. Lakhaney

TOK Teacher

What’s the most we can remember?

April 17, 2017

“Instead, researchers believe memories form in the connections between neurons and across neural networks. Each neuron sprouts extensions like train lines from a commuter hub, looping in about a thousand other nerve cells neurons. This architecture, it is thought, makes the elements of memories available across the whole tangled web. As such, the concept of a blue sky, say, can show up in countless, notionally discrete memories of outdoor scenes.

“Reber calls this effect “exponential storage,” and with it the brain’s memory capacity “goes through the roof.” ”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150401-whats-the-most-we-can-remember

The Women with Superhuman Vision

April 15, 2017

“A tiny group of people can see ‘invisible’ colours that no-one else can perceive, discovers David Robson. How do they do it?”

“Today, she knows that this is a symptom of a condition known as “tetrachromacy”. Thanks to a variation in a gene that influences the development of their retinas, people like Antico can see colours invisible to most of us. Consider a pebble pathway. What appears dull grey to you or me shines like a jeweller’s display to Antico. “The little stones jump out at me with oranges, yellows, greens, blues and pinks,” she says. “I’m kind of shocked when I realise what other people aren’t seeing.””

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision

How East and West think in profoundly different ways

April 15, 2017

“Psychologists are uncovering the surprising influence of geography on our reasoning, behaviour, and sense of self.”

“Some of the most notable differences revolved around the concepts of “individualism” and “collectivism”; whether you consider yourself to be independent and self-contained, or entwined and interconnected with the other people around you, valuing the group over the individual. Generally speaking – there are many exceptions – people in the West tend to be more individualist, and people from Asian countries like India, Japan or China tend to be more collectivist.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways

This Article Won’t Change Your Mind: The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs

April 15, 2017

“This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe—they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/?utm_

Why our emotions are cultural – not built in at birth

April 15, 2017

“There is no scientific evidence that we are hardwired with emotions, says Lisa Feldman Barrett. They develop as we grow.”

“Emotions are thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. This internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of western civilisation. It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast. This view of emotions has been around for millennia. Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin. Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in the classical view.

“And yet there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure muscle movement during an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety with the body and brain. You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without a change in the amygdala, the brain region tagged as the home of fear.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/mar/26/why-our-emotions-are-cultural-not-hardwired-at-birth

A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages

April 15, 2017

lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size

How does this visual representation give us a different sense of meaning than a traditional map?

“This linguistic map paints an alternative map of Europe, displaying the language families that populate the continent, and the lexical distance between the languages. The closer that distance, the more words they have in common. The further the distance, the harder the mutual comprehension.

“The map shows the language families that cover the continent: large, familiar ones like Germanic, Italic-Romance and Slavic; smaller ones like Celtic, Baltic and Uralic; outliers like Semitic and Turkic; and isolates – orphan languages, without a family: Albanian and Greek.”

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages

Here is a site with some additional posts and discussions of related issues by the creator of this image.

https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/category/linguistics/

How do language and lifestyle affect your perceptions?

April 15, 2017

Part of an interesting video series, Do You See What I See. The first part of this link shows an African tribe, the Himba, whose language and environment differ so much from ours that they are able to distinguish different shades very differently from us. The link below is for the part that shows the Himba tribe. At the bottom of the video player are links for the rest of that show.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1_horizon-do-you-see-what-i-see-part-4-4_shortfilms

Here an article about how those same people are able to discern optical illusions better than people who live in modern societies.

The Astonishing Vision of Namibia’s Nomads

“The Himba people of Namibia can see fine details and ignore distraction much better than most other human beings – a finding that may reflect the many ways that modern life is changing our minds and abilities.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170306-the-astonishing-focus-of-namibias-nomads

To what extent is forensic science actually “science”?

April 11, 2017

This is an interesting example of the debate over what science is and who gets to define it. The validity and value of the forensic sciences has been greatly debated over time and despite people’s confidence in these sciences (mostly because of tv shows), research has proven that these sciences are unreliable. What happens when questioning the value of science undermines the institutions built upon that science? In this case, law enforcement seems to have exclusive domain over determining the value and validity of these sciences and these sciences are made to serve their purposes.

“Every independent critique of our forensic science system comes back to the same basic conclusion about both the root of the problem and how to fix it: Forensic science rests under the exclusive control of police and prosecutors, and its legitimacy and integrity have suffered as a result.”

“The professional association for the nation’s district attorneys criticized the report for its insufficient attention to “the ancient debate over precisely what constitutes ‘science’ ” while asserting that the final arbiter of good science should be lawyers and courtrooms, not scientists and laboratories.”

And another article from the Times about the same issue. Once again, gets to the question about what science is.

How Should Art Address Human Rights?

April 9, 2017

bb414c342“Artists can certainly capture crises via their own aesthetic sensibility, and can use their platforms to draw a different kind of awareness to specific tragedies. But in doing so, many artists like Ai have had to figure out how to balance their own perspectives as emotionally invested outsiders with respect for their subjects. Often, the most resonant art they create are works where the excesses of self-expression have been peeled back; in the cases of pieces like Laundromat, they allow the evidence of the crisis to connect with viewers as directly as possible.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/how-should-art-address-human-rights/521520/