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 ( 7356 )
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My Jazz Education 7: Learning to Improvise, Part 1
I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More, Why is Literary Form All But Invisible to Literary Criticism? (With...
Yes, because literary criticism is oriented toward the interpretation of meaning, and form cannot, in general be “cashed out” in terms of meaning. Read more
Posted on 24 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More into the Breach: Interpretation IS NOT Reading (contra Hartman and...
Christopher Ricks, In theory, London Review of Books, Vol. 3 No. 7 · 16 April 1981. Once he gets going Ricks starts riding one of my favorite hobbyhorses,... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Light Rail, Liberty State Park
Posted on 21 October 2016
SELF EXPRESSION
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Neural Basis of Auditory Entrainment
In PsyPost: The auditory brainstem responds more consistently to regular sound sequences than irregular sound sequences, according to a recent study published... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Laughter, Real and Fake
Kate Murphy, The Science of the Fake Laugh, The NYTimes: Laughter at its purest and most spontaneous is affiliative and bonding. To our forebears it meant,... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Blues: The British Get Invaded and Uncle Clint Talks Piano
A few days ago I republished my review of segments 1, 2, 3 of Martin Scorsese’s blues series. Here’s my account of 6 and 7, plus a conclusion in which I... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yikes! This is Post Number 4072
And I hadn't even noticed I'd passed 4000. 2500 is he last milestone I noted, and that was back on July 14, 2014, when I wrote a brief analysis to what I've bee... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2016 CULTURE -
Life as Jamie Knows It @3QD, with Some Remarks About Intelligence
I was half-considering tacking “aka writing about a retard” to the end of my title, right after “3QD”, but the word “retard” is just too ugly and there’s no... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kids These Days...need a Place to Play
When I was a kid I lived in a suburban neighborhood that was on the border of a semi-rural area. A neighbor up the road had a small wheat field. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Universality of Facial Experssions is Being Questioned
Science Magazine, 17 Oct 2016: For or more than a century, scientists have wondered whether all humans experience the same basic range of emotions—and if they... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ethical Criticism and “Darwinian” Literary Study
Angus Fletcher, Another Literary Darwinism, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2014, 450-469. It opens (450): There are, Jonathan Kramnick has remarked,... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
High Tech Partnership to Ease Public Anxiety About Computers and Robots Talking...
From the NYTimes, Sept 28: The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Michelle Obama and the Stealth Transition: Gardens Across America
Just a reminder about the out-going First Lady. Originally posted on 8.31.12. The way I see it, the smart money is on First Lady Michelle Obama, not to do a... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Empirical Study of Abstract Concepts
Felix Hill, Anna Korhonen, Christian Bentz, A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction, Cognitive Science 38 (2014) 162–177. Read more
Posted on 17 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Art of Jamie Bérubé
I’ve consolidated my posts about the art of Jamie Bérubé into a single document with the title Jamie’s Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ursula Le Guin Profiled in The New Yorker
Julie Phillips writes: Ursula absorbed these stories, together with the books she read: children’s classics, Norse myths, Irish folktales, the Iliad. Read more
Posted on 16 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jamie’s Investigations, Part 6: What We Have Discovered
When I started investigating Jamie Bérubé’s art I had no particular expectations, just a reasonable belief that it would be worthwhile. Now that I’ve examined... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cerebral Plasticity and Localization; Mathematics, Vision, Numerosity
Dan Modano, Blind People Do Math In The Visual Cortex , ReliaWire: People blind from birth appear to do math in a part of the brain typically devoted to... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three White Men Look for the Blues: Wenders, Scorsese, and Pierce. One of Them...
Some years ago Martin Scorsese put together a documentary series on the blues, seven episodes, each by a different director. I reviewed five of the seven and... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
