Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7828 )
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Using Machine Learning to "imitate" Speech Processing in the Brain
Result 1: self-supervised learning suffices to make this algorithm learn brain-like representations (i.e. most brain areas significantly correlate with its... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is (musical) Pleasure? [Csikszentmihalyi's Flow]
I had to confront that question when writing my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Ever since the late 1950s there has been talk about “pleasure centers i... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Black Barge Carrying Red Containers Going up River, Passing the Empire State...
Posted on 06 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Across 110 Languages, People Can Describe Warm Colors (🟡🔴) Faster Than Cool...
A universal: across 110 languages, people can describe warm colors (🟡🔴) faster than cool ones (🔵🟢). Why? We create names for wha... Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Empire State Building in 3 Colorways
Posted on 05 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What's up America? Fans Are Out.of.control!
Lindsay Crouse, Fandom Is Out of Control, NYTimes, 5 June 2022. Whatever you think of this week’s verdict in Mr. Depp’s defamation case against Ms. Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Book Argues That Jack Welch's Tenure at GE Catalyzed the Transformation of...
Kurt Anderson, How Jack Welch Revolutionized the American Economy, NYTimes, June 2, 2022. Anderson reviews THE MAN WHO BROKE CAPITALISM: How Jack Welch Gutted... Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Purple and Orange
Posted on 04 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Teaching Writing at the High School Level
THREAD Fluid writing requires having a large repertoire of techniques ready to hand. This thread is about helping students increase their repertoire of... Read more
Posted on 04 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neural Correlates of Pro-social Behavior in Rodents
In our paper, review data from hundreds of studies to demonstrate that rodents robustly show emotional contagion for the distress of others using neural... Read more
Posted on 04 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Versions of the Night
Posted on 03 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Fourth Arena 2: New Beings in Time
Yesterday I suggested that we are at the edge of a new era in cosmic history, at least our local version of it, for we have little idea what’s been happening... Read more
Posted on 03 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What a View! Those Apartments Face New York City.
Posted on 03 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Greedflation: Does Economics Need a Reset, Reboot, and Rethink?
Lydia DePillis, Is ‘Greedflation’ Rewriting Economics, or Do Old Rules Still Apply? NYTimes, June 3, 2022. Since prices started to escalate a year ago,... Read more
Posted on 03 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Roses in the Jersey City Heights
Posted on 02 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Fourth Arena: What’s Up in the World These Days? We’re Moving to a New, a Ne...
About ten years of so ago I discovered object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Bruno Latour. That plunged me into a philosophy period during which I ended up taking ... Read more
Posted on 02 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches
Bumping to the top to mark the profusion of creativity pouring out of machine learning and deep learning. We're heading into the 4th Arena! Read more
Posted on 01 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Map of Cortical Activation While Reading Aloud
Now available at #JNeurosci @SfNJournals “A spatiotemporal map of reading aloud” We mapped the spread of activity across the brain while reading aloud known... Read more
Posted on 01 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Weak Shadow of Early Life Language Processing Persists in the Right Hemisphere
of the Mature Brain | by Kelly C. Martin, Elissa L. Newport colleagues | https://t.co/Ss5z3NRLbA pic.twitter.com/faDxDT5roT— Neurobiology of Language... Read more
Posted on 01 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Traffic Lights from Yesterday's Walk
Posted on 01 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
