The brain is a category buster

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Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.

“Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,” said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. “Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.”

This new scientific appreciation of emotion is profoundly altering the field. The top journals are now filled with research on the connections between emotion and cognition. New academic stars have emerged, such as Antonio Damasio of USC, Joseph LeDoux of NYU, and Joshua Greene, a rising scholar at Harvard. At the same time, the influx of neuroscientists into the field, armed with powerful brain-scanning technology, has underscored the thinking-feeling connection.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

the responsive eye

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SO WHY OP NOW? Some forty years after the Museum of Modern Art, New York, introduced Op art to the American public with its landmark 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye,” two museums have mounted historical shows looking back: “Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s” at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio (through June 17); and “Op Art” at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (through May 20). Both are ambitious curatorial efforts, distinct in certain relative emphases, and for that very reason providing in tandem an unusually rich perspective on a movement consigned by pretty much everyone to the dustbin of art history. Yet such impressive attentiveness only serves to raise the stakes with respect to the question, Why should we be looking at this midcentury anachronism again? What are we supposed to learn? The cynic no doubt wonders whether all those museum curators, academics, and artists who have been mining the ’60s for good material finally found the well dried up—meaning, Op is all that’s left to “rediscover.”

more from artforum here.

comedy beats tragedy

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What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?

Well, let’s go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods’ view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

A Disciplined Business

Jon Mooallem in the New York Times Magazine:

29kink600_1Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”

Acworth has since built what is arguably the country’s most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day — then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.

More here.

For Motherly X Chromosome, Gender Is Only the Beginning

From The New York Times:Mom_2

As May dawns and the mothers among us excitedly anticipate the clever e-cards that we soon will be linking to and the overpriced brunches that we will somehow end up paying for, the following job description may ring a familiar note:

Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist.

As it happens, the above precis refers not only to the noble profession of motherhood to which we all owe our lives and guilt complexes. It is also a decent character sketch of the chromosome that allows a human or any other mammal to become a mother in the first place: the X chromosome.

More here.

The Handy Way of Speaking

From Science:Chimp

You don’t need to be Dr. Doolittle to know what a chimpanzee means when she reaches out with her hand, palm-side up. It’s the begging sign, a gesture that speaks volumes even without any accompanying sound. Indeed, so evocative are the manual gestures of chimpanzees and bonobos that a team of researchers has rekindled an old hypothesis: that human language evolved from gesturing, rather than from vocal calls.

Chimps and bonobos use a variety of calls and gestures in their everyday lives. But many researchers assumed that both forms of communication were little more than reflexes, as when a chimp screams when it sees a snake. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Yerkes National Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia suspected there was something more to ape gestures. So he and colleague Amy Pollick videotaped the vocal, facial, and manual signals of two captive groups of bonobos and two groups chimpanzees. Of the 375 communicative signals the bonobos produced, nearly 79% were hand gestures, while 14% were facial and/or vocal signals.

The researchers then identified the specific social contexts of the various types of communication.

More here.