"My recent research findings suggest that people are often well-advised to decide intuitively, in terms of how it makes them feel. There is emerging evidence that the act of deciding – and, in particular, making gut decisions – is emotionally rewarding." - Psyche
My work explores the ways in which creative individuals prioritise information differently to their less creative counterparts. In one of our studies, my research collaborators and I used a classic task to see how the brain responds to another type of high priority information: surprising information. - Psyche
Olivier Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. - Ian Leslie
Natasha Rothwell in conversation with Samara Joy: “Improv saved my life. You have to trust your instincts; you have to abandon the need for perfection. Maybe that’s why I love jazz so much.” - The New York Times
“This year’s festival will mark 10 years since Unesco designated Dundee a design city, alongside Berlin, Montreal, Istanbul and others. The accolade is given to cities which have an established design industry and opportunities for designers, among other criteria.” - The Observer (UK)
“I’m guessing an image generator scraped a photo of my dad from somewhere online (maybe the wedding pictures I posted in 2007?) and then didn’t jumble it up enough to make it into someone new. Instead, it issued forth an eerie facsimile.” - Slate
There are burgeoning efforts to explore how LLMs can be used to automate research tasks, including writing papers, generating code and searching literature. But it’s been difficult to assess whether these AI tools can generate fresh research angles at a level similar to that of humans. - Nature
These corporations have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world. - Harper's
We all suffer from delusions, and we all, like Oedipus, use tricks of self-deception to keep ourselves from acknowledging truths about our lives. Yet understanding, or even describing, this everyday experience can seem like a fool’s errand. - Harper's
What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points. - The Walrus
The researchers found that, in jackpot scenarios, the activity of neurons associated with motor preparation decreased. Motor preparation is the brain’s way of making calculations about how to complete a movement — similar to lining up an arrow on a target before unleashing it. - Nature
Today, it can be digitally simulated, biologically synthesised or made from entirely different materials to those that allowed our evolutionary ancestors to flourish. These and other possibilities are inviting researchers to ask more fundamental questions: if the materials for life can radically change – like the materials for computation – what stays the same?
In 2010, a political-science paper came out that made people worry. It suggested fact-checks might actually make people dig in their heels. What if telling people they’re wrong makes them double down rather than change their minds? - The Atlantic
Olivier Roy believes that a range of abstract and apparently unstoppable forces—globalization, neoliberalism, postmodernism, individualism, secularism, the Internet, and so on—are undermining culture by rendering it “transparent,” turning our cultural practices into “a collection of tokens” to be traded and displayed. - The New Yorker
Conspiracy theorists appear earnestly committed to finding the truth, yet they are drawn to theories that often involve false and implausible claims. The psychology of insight – especially the rewarding feelings associated with discovery and revelation – can resolve this paradox, helping to illuminate the surprising role that deep thinking plays in proliferating conspiracies. - Psyche
