Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman
There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman. That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a…

July 25 2010, 7:36am | Comments
Bookmark Losing our minds to the web
Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US…

July 1 2010, 6:50am | Comments
Bookmark Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind
In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that…

June 29 2010, 11:49am | Comments
Bookmark The Writer Who Couldn't Read
"In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to…

June 27 2010, 8:03am | Comments
Bookmark My bright idea: Guy Deutscher
Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable…

June 13 2010, 5:33am | Comments
Bookmark The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: What happens when three men who identify…
In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for…

June 12 2010, 9:18am | Comments
Bookmark Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed
Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing…

June 1 2010, 2:53am | Comments
Bookmark 'It's time to let you hear the song which earned me a…
Aged 17, I set about writing a song for a girl I was obsessed with. When she heard it, she called the police. Have a listen – you'll understand why. I've…

April 9 2010, 3:34am | Comments
Bookmark Next Big Thing - Literary Scholars Turn to Science
This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are…

April 6 2010, 12:04pm | Comments
Bookmark A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter
In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up…

February 21 2010, 4:00pm | Comments
Wikipedia Other The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is 'other' than the concept being considered. The term often means a person…

January 26 2010, 1:48pm | Comments
Bookmark Philip K. Dick: A 'plastic' paradox
When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction titan:…

January 24 2010, 5:06pm | Comments
Wikipedia Cargo cult A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture through magical thinking…

January 8 2010, 9:51am | Comments
Bookmark The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia
SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton…

December 7 2009, 5:11pm | Comments
Bookmark Into the Uncanny Valley
Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the…

December 7 2009, 5:08pm | Comments
Bookmark Thinking literally
Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the…

September 28 2009, 8:59am | Comments
Bookmark My Ten Favorite Fetishes
Having studied sexual fetishes for twenty years (which is itself a kind of fetish), I'm long past the investigation of shoes, pain, vomit and rubbing up against people on the subway.…

July 10 2009, 8:46am | Comments
Bookmark The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content
Boston University neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has an interesting evolutionary theory of dreaming. McNamara’s theory draws from the well-known “handicapping principle” in evolutionary biology, where some organisms have been observed to display…

June 27 2009, 4:32am | Comments
Bookmark Adam Curtis: It Felt Like a Kiss
It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional way…

June 20 2009, 5:39am | Comments
Bookmark Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism
Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don't seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think how…

June 8 2009, 12:41am | Comments

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