Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her life’s work to the study of sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Cartwright discussed the film Inception with us a few weeks ago, and here she answers a few more questions I had about the unconscious mind.
One of the big news stories this week was about JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who famously unleashed an expletive-ridden rant over his plane’s PA system, then pulled emergency-evacuation chute lever and made a dramatic sliding exit onto the JFK tarmac. It is only appropriate, I think, that we take this moment to consider the intersection between e-readers and airplane safety. Please pull your desk chairs into the full, upright position and enjoy the following musings from Dennis Baron.
By Andrew Robinson
“In the early 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease. More scientists, writers, composers, and artists than ever before earn a living from their creative output. During the 20th century, performance standards and records continually improved in all fields—from music and singing to chess and sports. But where is the Darwin or the Einstein, the Mozart or the Beethoven, the Chekhov or the Shaw, the Cézanne or the Picasso or the Cartier-Bresson of today?”
“Physics is rather hard to blog, so I’ll write instead about the practitioners of science – what are they like? Are there certain personality types that do science? Does the science from different countries end up being different?”
Yesterday, I tried to start a #mathbattle on Twitter, but it proved too geeky to take. (Go figure.) I was having a nostalgic moment, remembering back in middle school when we had to write date equations. Everyday. Because each day, my friends, is different. A new day, full of new possibilities, opportunities, and numbers. Today is 7/30/2010. That means two things:
1) It will be August very, very soon.
2) We have the numbers 7, 3, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0 to work with. (Or, you can leave out a 2 and a 0. That is the cheater’s way.)
LET’S DO IT! —> 7 – ((3+0)(2 + 0)) = (1 + 0)
Yessssss. Math is awesome. Got a better equation? Prove it. Until then, here are some interesting things.
“Some memories are more vivid than others, some experiences more profound. Pedro’s story is one of those. I remember the morning Pedro told me in the stroke clinic that his greatest pain since his stroke was his physical inability to care for Lucy, his dog. I remember the noose of hopelessness dangling around his neck; the way he sat in front of me, scratching frenziedly at his paralyzed right arm, the deep excoriation marks, the trails of oozing blood from under his skin, my concerns about a drug allergy, and the way he talked about Lucy. I remember watching tears fall from his heavy eyes and the relief in my heart that he was opening up for the first time in months since his stroke. I remember not knowing what to do; a momentary lapse that seemed infinitely long.”
Stonehenge was begun about 2800 B.C. by a people who had no written language, no wheeled vehicles, no draft animals, and no metal tools. To dig holes in the ground, they used the antlers of deer. The initial Stonehenge consisted of a circular embankment 350 feet (107 meters) in diameter, four marker stones set in a rectangle, some postholes, and the Heel Stone. The Heel Stone was apparently the first of the great boulders brought to this site as construction commenced. But it may not have stood alone. A similar huge stone stood just to its left as seen from the center of Stonehenge. In that ancient time, the Sun at the beginning of summer probably rose between the famed Heel Stone and its now-vanished companion, and the alignment with sunrise at the summer solstice was probably exact.
David Canter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hudderfield. Widely known for developing systemic offender profiling in Britain and creating the emerging field of Investigative Psychology, he also provides evidence to government enquiries and major court cases. His new book is Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction, and in the short excerpt below he looks at what a ‘psychpath’ really is.
Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dream and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor Psychiatry at Emory University where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Science Initiative. His new book, Obesity: The Biography, traces the history of obesity from the ancient Greeks to the present day, acknowledging that its history is shaped by the meanings attached to the obese body, defined in part by society and culture. In the excerpt below we learn about “globesity”.
Vlatko Vedral is Professor of Quantum Information Science at the Universities of Oxford and Singapore. He has published more than 130 research papers, two textbooks, and is the author of Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information. Here, Vedral makes the case for why four-year-olds just might be the best students of quantum mechanics.
They’re coming, and they’ll be here by September! Robot teachers, programmed with a single mission: to save our failing schools. Funded by the Frankenstein Foundation, computer engineers in secret mountain laboratories and workshops hidden deep below the desert floor are feverishly soldering chips and circuit boards onto bits of aluminum to create mechanical life forms whose sole purpose is to teach English. We need this invasion of English-teaching robots because, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, “an unprecedented number of children in the US start public school with major deficits in basic academic skills, including vocabulary skills.”
“You’ve given me new hope.” So read the e-mail that arrived shortly after Parade Magazine published a story about my research showing that trying to manage weight gain while stopping smoking can help rather than hurt successful quitting. A steady stream of similar messages flowed in, taking my mind back to the days when I first started to study weight gain after quitting smoking. I still flinch at the memories.
In a list of the colonies’ grievances against King George III Jefferson wrote, “he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-subjects, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property.” But the future president, whose image now graces the two-dollar bill, must have realized right away that “fellow-subjects” was the language of monarchy, not democracy, because “while the ink was still wet” Jefferson took out “subjects” and put in “citizens.”
Neuroscientist Simon LeVay has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and is well-known for a 1991 study in which he reported on a difference in brain structure between gay and straight men. His forthcoming book Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation examines the evidence that suggests sexual orientation results primarily from an interaction between genes, sex hormones, and the cells of the developing body and brain. In this original post, LeVay explains how he initially reacts to new reported findings in this field.
Matt J. Rossano is head of the Psychology department at Southeastern Louisiana University. His new book, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved, presents an evolutionary history of religion, drawing together evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show the valuable adaptive purpose served by systemic belief in the supernatural. In the excerpt below, Rossano reminds us of the comfort of believing in things that may be irrational.