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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An Interesting, and Negative, Review of "Maestro"
Maestro Movie Review today! Beyond The Trailer host Grace Randolph's reaction review of the 2023 movie from Bradley Cooper about Leonard Bernstein! Will it wi... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Red Nucleus
The brainstem’s red nucleus was evolutionarily upgraded to support goal-directed action (https://t.co/G2CpMwTIHI) ... Originally for quadrupedal locomotion, it... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Good Morning. Here Comes the Sun.
Posted on 04 January 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Musical Synchronization Strikes Again!
Musical synchronization emerges spontaneously and enhances social connectedness via @psypost https://t.co/VHBO8Lzuif— Warren Mansell... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Physics for Little Girls
Give her physics! Physics for all the little girls! From "The Silver Chair" by C.S. Lewis, 1953 pic.twitter.com/ezENmu7Uf9— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) January... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Update: My Mood Over the Long Term [intellectual Productivity]
As you may know, I use my posting pattern as a gauge of my overall long-term mood. The better my mood, the more I post in a month. Read more
Posted on 04 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Runrise in Hoboken This Morning
Posted on 03 January 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Bifurcation in Brain Dynamics Reveals a Signature of Conscious Processing...
pic.twitter.com/mNSOoqrTLr— CLaE (@leafs_s) May 30, 2023 Abstract: An outstanding challenge for consciousness research is to characterize the neural signature o... Read more
Posted on 03 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is Depression? [an Umbrella Term]
Joanna Thompson, The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think, Quanta Magazine, Jan. 26, 2023. Thompson opens by discussing a recent literature... Read more
Posted on 02 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Elephans, Cats, Owls, and Other Creatures
Posted on 02 January 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Maestro @3QD – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Rock and Roll!]
My latest article for 3 Quarks Daily is now online: Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All I might have subtitled it, The... Read more
Posted on 02 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mickey Mouse, Free at Last! – And Not Only Mickey and Minnie
Happy new year ! And happy public domain day with a major new entry: the original design of Mickey Mouse!For the occasion I’m releasing Mickey-1928 a model on... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Savanna Traffic Was UP in 2023
This chart shows the traffic here for the last three months. It went way up in the last 10 days of November, back down for the first two weeks of December, and... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Degradation of GPT-4
An explanation for why GPT-4 is degrading:"... we find that on datasets released before the LLMtraining data creation date, LLMs perform surprisingly better tha... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nina Paley Loves Being Sucked into AI [Happy New Year!]
Other artists hate having their work and styles sucked into AI. But I love it! My work is all Free Culture, I am thrilled to find my name on this list. Read more
Posted on 01 January 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Anamnesis and Large Language Models
I’ve reached the tentative conclusion that LLMs are associative memories. Well, in the Meno, Plato advances the idea that learning is, in fact, recollection,... Read more
Posted on 31 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does ChatGPT Know What a Tragedy Is?
Tragedy is one of those things where one says, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Consequently philosophers and literary scholars have been... Read more
Posted on 30 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Psychedelics, Meditation, and the Brain | Robert Wright & Kathryn Devaney
0:00 Kati’s very unusual Venn diagram 4:24 Your brain on meditation 10:31 The time Bob’s meditation got weird 16:15 What are the “jhanas”? Read more
Posted on 29 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Spatial Constraints and 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀
đđźđ đąđź... Read more
Posted on 29 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neural Correlates of Metaphor Processing
Gwenda L. Schmidt and Carol A. Seger, Neural Correlates of Metaphor Processing: The Roles of Figurativeness, Familiarity and Difficulty, Brain Cogn. 2009... Read more
Posted on 29 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
