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 ( 7809 )
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Sound and Music: Emotion Tracks Changes in the Acoustic Environment
Weiyi Maa and William Forde Thompsona, Human emotions track changes in the acoustic environment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 112 no. 4... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Time and the Hippocampus
Emily Singer in Quantum: Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual’s... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Narrative Order and Attention
The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit Anna-Lisa Cohen, Elliot Shavalian, Moshe Rube. PLOS One Published:... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Apple, It's a Matter of Scale
Frahad Manjoo, in the NYTimes, assuring us that Apple is doing fine: Apple’s iPhone business is now so huge it sounds almost fantastical — Apple books more... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
So Much for Unbounded Progress
Paul Krugman reviewing The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War: Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished... Read more
Posted on 25 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Interpreting a Literary Text Like Giving a Non-Technical Account of a...
I think so. Not completely, of course, but the similarities are worth thinking about. There are two basic similarities: 1) Neither activity is well-defined. Read more
Posted on 25 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What's in All the Syllabuses?
The Open Syllabus Project has a database of over a million syllabuses gathered from university websites. What books are assigned most often? The traditional... Read more
Posted on 22 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Snow from Winters Past
Posted on 22 January 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Phylogeny of European Folk Tales
Royal Society Open Science Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales Sara Graça da Silva, Jamshid J. Tehrani... Read more
Posted on 21 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kamasi Washington on the Groove
Adam Schatz has an article about Kamasi Washington in the NY Times Magazine. Here's some passages. Playing in church: When Kamasi first expressed a desire to... Read more
Posted on 21 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Curse of Parking
Clive Thompson in Mother Jones: The average automobile spends 95 percent of its time sitting in place. People buy cars because they need to move around, but... Read more
Posted on 20 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does the 6-part Lucas Star Wars Series Constitute a Ring?
That's what Mike Klimo argued back in October of 2014. After noting all sorts of relationships among different episodes he asserts: Because here’s the thing: Th... Read more
Posted on 19 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where Dogs Come from
James Gorman has an article about the origins of dogs in the NYTimes. The idea that humans bred them from wolves is now out of favor. Read more
Posted on 18 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
American Paranoia
David Masciotra in Salon: A major part of the American condition is fear. Paranoia in America stretches from fright of drugs to panic over Islamic invaders... Read more
Posted on 18 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Interior Monologue
Posted on 15 January 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Art in the Brain and the Default Mode Network (DMN)
I've got abstracts and links to two articles on art and something called the default mode network, which Wikipedia defines as follows: In neuroscience, the... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Attridge And Staten 5: Dickinson Started Early, Turned a Figure with the Sea
For their second exercise in dialogic minimal interpretation Attridge and Staten (The Craft of Poetry, 2015) chose Emily Dickinson’s “I started Early.”... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It's the Kids, and Their Parents, And, Yes, Their Teachers
How to fix the nation's schools, in the NYTimes: Today Union City, which opted for homegrown gradualism, is regarded as a poster child for good urban education. Read more
Posted on 10 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: A Little of This and That
Posted on 08 January 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Age of Stupid Machines
Joel Achenbach has an article in The Washington Post about AI voodoo, The AI Anxiety. He’s properly skeptical about the possibility of superintelligence, as I... Read more
Posted on 08 January 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
