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POPSHow Advertising Manipulates Our “Caveman” Brains (& How to Resist) Fortunately, there are ways to go about PROOFING YOUR BRAIN. 1. Change your mindset to “postmore” by challenging culture’s ingrained assumption that “more” of everything is automatically better. 2. Grow your gratitude. Our poor, starved, frozen ancestors would cry tears of joy if they suddenly landed in our culture of abundance. Fostering our appreciation of this bounty can also block the consumerist “cool” pressure to deride so many of our fine, workable possessions as “so last year”. 3. Be enough. We’re constantly told that we aren’t rich enough, glam enough, cool enough, networked enough, etc. This has a powerful insidious effect on our primitive, socially competitive brain circuits. It’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddlers wanting “more, more, more!
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POPSThe Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You Despite its many flaws, I’m a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization—writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it—makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe.
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POPSThe Crisis is Coming: How Peak Water Could Reshape Civilization With advanced technologies and more prudent water usage, the majority of Earth’s inhabitants will be able to continue to enjoy the luxury of clean water for a long time to come. Yes, we need to fundamentally rethink water usage and plenty of bigger changes are needed, but at least we’re heading in the right direction. With better stewardship and improved city planning, humans will likely be able to avert a good portion of the more disastrous scenarios.
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POPSTiger Pictures Siberian tigers are among the world's most endangered species. They are estimated to number less than 500 in the wild. In about 100 years only a dozen white tigers have been seen in the wild in India. Other Photos at the website include: A 26-day-old endangered Sumatran tiger cub cuddles up to a 5-month-old female orangutan One of Australia's only two 'tigons,' a man-made hybrid created by crossing a male tiger with a lioness, licks its lips at the National Zoo. Bearing the stripes of a tiger and the physique of a lioness, tigons are usually infertile. An Indian Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris) walks in a pool at a zoo
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POPSThe evolution of drug abuse "All this shows “our ancestors were regularly exposed to plant neurotoxins,” they added, so the view of our brains as unsuspecting victims of the new chemical threat is untenable. " " One possibility, the scientists suggested, is that animals co-opted some plant toxins and used them for their own defenses against parasites. If this is true, then evolution, the process by which species adapt and change to meet environmental demands, might have designed our brains to encourage some drug use. This could involve shaping our brains to associate drug intake with feelings of reward."
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POPSFuture Human: The Evolution of Immediate Emotion Humans, apparently, are still in the early stages of evolving extended response mechanisms. But it seems likely that by the time we portion more of our brain to long-term dangers, there will be few grizzly bears around to worry about, and a whole lotta global warming.
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