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POPSDoes Religion Make You Nice?Does atheism make you mean? It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.
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POPS Does Time really Slow Down in a Crisis? Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by." And though the results of this study can lead towards disorders linked with timing, such as schizophrenia, Eagleman believes "it's really about understanding the virtual reality machinery that we're trapped in,"Our brain constructs this reality for us that, if we look closely, we can find all these strange illusions in. The fact that we're now seeing this with how we perceive time is new."
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POPSSocial Interactions Can Alter Gene Expression In Brain, And Vice Versa A critical insight came in 1992, in a study of songbirds led by David Clayton. He and his colleagues found that expression of a specific gene increases in the forebrain of a zebra finch or canary just after it hears a new song from a male of the same species. This gene, egr1, codes for a protein that itself regulates the expression of other genes.
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POPSCheney Refuses to Leave When asked about Cheney's decision, President George W. Bush said, "I don't really care what the old fart does. Personally, I just want to get home to Crawford. I've trees to cut, brush to clear, memoirs to write."
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POPSArtist as Public Servant A successful artwork is one that somehow causes that audience to experience a shift in perception. With this understanding, I was able to modify my orientation from that of an artist creating objects for consumption to that of an artist working as a public servant to create experiences that change people’s ideas of what it means to be a community. agree?/disagree?
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POPSHas new physics been found at the ageing Tevatron? The CDF muons appear to have come from the decay of a particle with a mass of about 1 GeV. So could they be a signature of dark matter? "We are trying to figure that out," says Weiner. "But I would be excited by the CDF data regardless."
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POPSIs our emotions that make thought possible? "Before Damasio came onto the scene, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions only interfered with rational thought. It was assumed that a person without any emotions would be a better thinker, since their “cortical computer” could process information without the hindrance of emotion. Damasio’s research challenged the assumption by showing that people who have suffered brain injuries which prevent them from perceiving their own feelings, are ineffective decision-makers. Most would spend hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. Damasio’s research, among many other studies, is revealing that emotion is what enables us to make up our minds. It is pure reason- not feeling- that is the true hindrance to decision making. So take that, Mr. Spock!
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POPSMind Beyond Brain Andy Clark’s new book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind), mentioned as a forthcoming title last March in David Chalmers’s blog, is now available. The foreword by Chalmers is online.
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