h/t: MoveOn.org
CLIMATE CHANGE: ThoughtBubbler / “Bill McKibben’s Thought Bubble: The Fight of Our Time”
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Category Archives: Science
LITERARY NEUROSCIENCE: Corrie Goldman / “This is your Brain on Jane Austen, and Stanford Researchers are Taking Notes”
In an innovative interdisciplinary study, neurobiological experts, radiologists and humanities scholars are working together to explore the relationship between reading, attention and distraction – by reading Jane Austen.
Surprising preliminary results reveal a dramatic and unexpected increase in blood flow to regions of the brain beyond those responsible for “executive function,” areas which would normally be associated with paying close attention to a task, such as reading, said Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar leading the project.
[…]
Pioneering in a number of respects, her research is “one of the first fMRI experiments to study how our brains respond to literature,” Phillips said, as well as the first to consider “how cognition is shaped not just by what we read, but how we read it.”
Critical reading of humanities-oriented texts is recognized for fostering analytical thought, but if such results hold across subjects, Phillips said it would suggest “it’s not only what we read – but thinking rigorously about it that’s of value, and that literary study provides a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.”
ANTITHEISM: “Evolution for the win!”
INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY: Christopher Hitchens / “If You Want to be Awe Inspired”
CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE: Rev. Emily C. Heath / “How to Determine If Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions”
It seems like this election season “religious liberty” is a hot topic. Rumors of its demise are all around, as are politicians who want to make sure that you know they will never do anything to intrude upon it.
[…]
Quick Questions.” Just pick “A” or “B” for each question.
1. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
B) Others are allowed to go to religious services of their own choosing.2. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to marry the person I love legally, even though my religious community blesses my marriage.
B) Some states refuse to enforce my own particular religious beliefs on marriage on those two guys in line down at the courthouse.3. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am being forced to use birth control.
B) I am unable to force others to not use birth control.[…]
10. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to teach my children the creation stories of our faith at home.
B) Public school science classes are teaching science.
PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC: Alix Spiegel / “Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Evolution” / AUDIO
Six years ago, Glenn Schellenberg decided to do an experiment.
Schellenberg works at the University of Toronto, where he studies the psychology of music. The idea behind his experiment couldn’t have been more straightforward: He simply wanted to play music for people and get them to rate how happy or sad that music made them feel.
These two emotions — happy and sad — are relatively easy to identify in music, and though there are different ways for music to convey emotion (through lyrics or what kind of instruments are used), Schellenberg says the tempo of a song and whether it’s in a major or minor key often strongly influences which emotion the song conveys.
“Happy-sounding songs typically tend to be in a major key, and they tend to be fast, [with] more beats per minute,” he says. “Conversely, sad-sounding songs tend to be slow in tempo, and they also tend to be in a minor key.”
So Schellenberg sat down with a grad student and told him to find both happy-sounding fast music in a major key and sad-sounding slow music in a minor key. Essentially, they were looking for emotionally clear music that they could play for their future research subjects.
But while the grad student had no trouble finding fast, happy-sounding music in a major key when he looked at older musical eras — from the classical period up through the 1960s — it got a lot harder when it came to contemporary pop music.
CHRISTIAN IMBECILITY: Dusty Smith / “Fuck Katt Williams!”
TEA PARTY: The Newsroom / “Tea Party is the American Taliban” / “The Tea Party and Koch”
TEA PARTY: The Newsroom / “The Tea Party and Koch”
EVOLUTION: Bill Nye / “Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children”
“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”
h/t: Planet Atheism
h/t: Friendly Atheist
REASON: Bill Maher / “My New Rule for Todd Akin and the Republican Party”
. . . Here’s the only thing you need to know about Todd Akin and human anatomy: he’s an asshole. What I want to talk about is how it’s not a coincidence that the party of fundamentalism is also the party of fantasy. When I say religion is a mental illness, this is what I mean: it corrodes your mental faculties to the point where you can believe in tiny ninja warriors who hide in vaginas and lie in wait for bad people’s sperm.
Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn’t affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be.
[…]
. . . [B]ecause we’re already such a religious country, our minds are primed for magical, fantasy thinking. The gullibility comes factory-installed. They’ve learned that you appeal not to an American’s head, but to his gut — it’s a much bigger target. But here’s the problem: life is complicated. I mean, I know we know some things for sure, like why Jesus put us here on Earth: to watchHere Comes Honey Boo Boo on a 50-inch TV screen. But what about the Chinese slaves who made the TV? What about carbon from the coal that generated the electricity? What about the Walmart where we bought it, where the workers don’t have health insurance? What about racism, or the oceans turning into nail polish remover? The grown-up answer is: identify problems scientifically, prioritize and solve. The Republican answer is: there isn’t a problem. And anyone who tells you different is a liar who hates America. We don’t have to make hard choices. We just have to ignore the science and the math — that’s why God gave us values.
Always Question Authority 