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“People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.”
“Rozin’s team began by analysing a corpus of 100 million words of spoken and written English and found that positive words are used far more often than negative words – just as you’d expect if positive events are more common (to take one example, ‘good’ is mentioned 795 times per million words compared with 153 mentions per million for ‘bad’).”
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2010/06/how-language-reflects-balance-of-good.html
“While mathematics remains our most rigorous form of knowledge, the extreme complexity and length of some recent proofs have made them nearly impossible to check. As proofs continue to grow more complicated, mathematicians worry they will have to accept a greater degree of uncertainty than they’ve traditionally been comfortable with.”
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/mathematical_uncertainty
“Thus, positive moods enhanced peripheral vision and increased the extent to which the brain encoded information in those parts of the visual field, to which the participants did not pay attention. Conversely, negative moods decreased the encoding of peripheral information. But does the enhanced peripheral vision that occurs because of positive mood induction come at the expense of central (or “foveal”) vision? Schmitz and his colleagues compared FFA activity in the positive and negative mood induction trials, but found no difference. The enhanced peripheral vision following positive mood induction does not, therefore, occur as a result of a trade-off with central vision.”
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/06/08/how-we-feel-affects-what-we-see/
“Since reported tastiness is a poor measure of true taste experience in the era of fMRI scanning machines, the researchers were careful enough to take a peek into their participant’s brains as these tasted the wines, and found something fairly surprising: When tasting the wine out of the $10 bottle, the medial orbitofrontal cortex – an area of the brain that is strongly related to experiences of pleasure – showed only very little activity. When the exact same wine was poured out of a $90 bottle however, this brain area showed levels of activation which indicate that the participants were indeed drawing much more enjoyment from the same wine this time around. In other words, the price tag seemed to have a real physiological influence on the taster’s taste experience.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/quilted-science/201002/does-price-tag-have-taste
“Because the goal is supposed to be a body of reliable knowledge upon which the whole scientific community can draw to build more knowledge, it’s especially problematic when particular pieces of the scientific literature turn out to be dishonest or misleading. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are varieties of dishonesty that members of the scientific community look upon as high crimes. Indeed, they are activities that are defined as scientific misconduct and (at least in theory) prosecuted vigorously.”
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2010/03/27/how-hard-is-it-to-clean-up-the/
“The world turns on symmetry — from the spin of subatomic particles to the dizzying beauty of an arabesque. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Here, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy offers a glimpse of the invisible numbers that marry all symmetrical objects.”
“One of the most frightening forces at work in the world today is the tendency of Big Government toward perversion of science. The scientific method is pristine. Scientists are human, and fallible. The secular beatification of scientists and demeaning of science is a perversion. Better to beatify the scientific method and reserve some skepticism for scientists (and bureaucrats).”
“We are witness to, and victim of, the ongoing perversion of science. The US nutritional guidelines now are indicted as the root cause of many unnecessary deaths. The suppression of the debate over climate change similarly portends much misery. We are enmeshed, in the subversion of science to political ends, in a battle of epic proportions.”
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