From Phys.Org:
Our brains are obsessed with being social even when we are not in social situations. A Dartmouth-led study finds that the brain may tune towards social learning even when it is at rest. The findings published in an advance article of Cerebral Cortex, demonstrate empirically for the first time how two regions of the brain experience increased connectivity during rest after encoding new social information.
…For the study, 19 participants were asked to complete social encoding and non-social encoding tasks during a brain scan session while undergoing fMRI. Before encoding, they had a baseline rest scan and after each task, a resting state scan of 8.4 minutes, where they could think about anything, as long as they stayed awake.
- For the social encoding task, participants were asked to look at a photograph of a person, their job title such as “doctor” and two traits used to describe the individual such as “educated, sincere.” They were then prompted to evaluate the impression of the person by rating the person’s warmth and competence on a scale of 1 to 100 on a computer screen.
- The non-social encoding task was similar only participants were presented with photographs of a location that was paired with two traits used to describe it upon which they were asked to evaluate the place on warmth and pleasantness.
The participants encoded 60 social trials and 60-non-social trials. Some had the social encoding task first while others had the non-social one first. Right after the scan, participants completed a surprise, associative memory test in a quiet testing room, to assess if they could accurately identify certain photos of persons and places, and their respective set of traits, which were presented earlier. The findings revealed that during the rest period after social encoding, there was an increase in connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and tempoparietal junction regions. The greater the connectivity between these two default network regions, the higher the levels of social memory performance. The researchers observed an order effect in which participants who encoded the social information or photographs of persons first maintained higher levels of connectivity between these two brain regions during the post social rest and also the non-social rest period; however, this was not found to be the case for those who were presented with the non-social task first.
The study demonstrates that it appears that the brain consolidates social information as soon as it has the opportunity to rest. “When our mind has a break, we might be prioritizing what we learn about our social environment,” added Meyer.
More here.
WHEREVER YOU LOOK—the press release, the brochure, the fact sheet, the cornerstone—
Every era gets its own Thomas Cole, the British-born, nineteenth-century artist who ushered in a new age of American landscape painting. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was a precursor to artists like Grant Wood. Come the 1960s and 1970s, MoMA linked his brushwork to abstract expressionism. In the late 1980s, he was part of a Reaganesque “Morning in America” campaign, a Chrysler-sponsored survey of American landscape paintings at the Met. Now, also at the Met, “Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings” positions Cole as a challenge to Trumpian greed, as well as to the American landscape as imagined by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and EPA chief Scott Pruitt. But while Cole was undoubtedly concerned with the land he painted, he was not exactly the convenient social critic the Met portrays.
New words enter English in a variety of ways. They may be imported (
To investigate chimp communication, my colleagues and I follow chimpanzees through the forest as they go about their lives. We carry a hand-held “shotgun” microphone and a digital recorder, waiting for them to call.
The encouragement that the fifty-five-year-old psychology professor offers to his audiences takes the form of a challenge. To “take on the heaviest burden that you can bear.” To pursue a “voluntary confrontation with the tragedy and malevolence of being.” To seek a strenuous life spent “at the boundary between chaos and order.” Who dares speak of such things without nervous, self-protective irony? Without snickering self-effacement?
1. Your perspective on yourself is distorted.
Since 2013, 
In 1954, on holiday in Mexico, Norman Mailer discovered weed. He had smoked it before, but this time was different. He experienced “some of the most incredible vomiting I ever had … like an apocalyptic purge”. But soon “I was on pot for the first time in my life, really on.” His second wife, the painter Adele Morales, was sleeping on a couch nearby. “I could seem to make her face whoever I wanted [it] to be,” Mailer wrote later, in the journal he kept during his marijuana years. “Probably could change her into an animal if I wished.” After that he got high on a regular basis. On “tea” (he called his weed diary “Lipton’s Journal”), he felt that “For the first time in my life, I could really understand jazz.” He also got to know the mind of the Almighty, which bore, he discovered, a marked resemblance to his own. Hotboxing in his car every night for a week, Mailer groped his way to the ideas that would shape his work during the 1960s and beyond. They were not, on the whole, very good ideas. But by 1954 Mailer was a desperate man. He was thirty-one and had published two novels: The Naked and the Dead (1948), which had been a smash, and Barbary Shore (1952), which had tanked. He felt like a failure. He needed “the energy of new success”. Eventually, of course, new success would come. But things had to get a lot worse before they could get better.
Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the bitter envy of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, among others.
Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting. ‘I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty,’ she writes in The Last Supper, ‘why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth.’ A line like this is both overwrought and what I think myself when I look at these scenes. Why must we live in these places? Why must these be our concerns? Why do I have to know what McDonald’s is? It is a dissociate age and she is a dissociate artist. She is like nothing so much as that high little YouTube child fresh from the dentist, strapped into a car going he knows not where, further and further from his own will. Where is real life to be found? Is this it?
The first time Karl Ove Knausgaard saw Linda Bostrom, the Swedish writer he would later marry, he dropped everything he was holding. The first time she turned him down, he sliced his face to ribbons with a piece of broken glass. The first time they kissed, he fainted dead away.
About a year ago, the theoretical chemist 
Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, the center-right Washington think tank that has, amid a decade of turmoil inside the Republican Party, remained a sober, respected voice on matters of policy—while gradually shedding its George W. Bush-era reputation as a leading voice for pugnacious, interventionist foreign policy.
On Monday, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other leading lights of the Trumpist right gathered in Israel to celebrate the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, a gesture widely seen as a slap in the face to Palestinians who envision East Jerusalem as their future capital.