Amira's notes's Profile

Member since Mar 18, 2009, follows 0 people, 0 public groups, 1937 public bookmarks (2003 total).

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  • Born to Perform. The ability to keep cool depends on how your brain is wired by Joshua Gowin | Psychology Today on 2009-11-10
    • The ability to keep cool depends on how your brain is wired
    • As he waited to go onstage, a stage manager asked McCartney, "Are you nervous?
      "No, not really."
      "You should be, there are over 70 million people watching."
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  • The New Science of Temptation. What happens when Harvard scientists use a brain scanner to look for the devil inside? | Scientific American on 2009-11-09
    • A new brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. For example, foregoing the opportunity for short-term gain and satisfaction, whether it is a delicious slice of tiramisu or that wallet stuffed with cash you stumbled across in the empty parking lot, will depend more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.
  • Is President Obama a model of transformative leadership? by Jim Taylor | Psychology Today on 2009-11-09
  • Memory and forgetting in the digital age by Yadin Dudai | New Scientist 24 October 2009 on 2009-11-09
    • JUST as Molière's bourgeois gentleman spoke in prose without being aware of it, most of those who fear forgetting do not realise that they have amnesiphobia. But perhaps this tiny lexical blind spot is not important any more. Amnesiphobics, unite and rejoice: Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (and Bill Gates, in his enthusiastic introduction) now inform us that we need never fear forgetting again. Total recall is around the corner. But alas, in such a world, even our phobia of forgetting cannot be forgotten.
    • Total Recall is an extended corporate US manifesto, whose explicit slogan is: "I hate to lose my memories. I want total recall." The subtext is a bit more naive: I want total control over my life, I want immortality. If only I could record and store everything, I would become Homo eternicus. This is the same philosophy that feeds the US's mammoth pharmaceutical, food and health industries.
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  • The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do? Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons | Scientific American on 2009-11-09
    • Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination
    • What do glial cells do? And why do we have so many inside our head?



      KOOB: Originally, scientists didn't think they did anything.  Until the last 20 years, brain scientists believed neurons communicated to each other, represented our thoughts, and that glia were kind of like stucco and mortar holding the house together.  They were considered simple insulators for neuron communication.  There are a few types of glial cells, but recently scientists have begun to focus on a particular type of glial cell called the 'astrocyte,' as they are abundant in the cortex. Interestingly, as you go up the evolutionary ladder, astrocytes in the cortex increase in size and number, with humans having the most astrocytes and also the biggest.  Scientists have also discovered that astrocytes communicate to themselves in the cortex and are also capable of sending information to neurons. Finally, astrocytes are also the adult stem cell in the brain and control blood flow to regions of brain activity. Because of all these important properties, and since the cortex is believed responsible for higher thought, scientists have started to realize that astrocytes must contribute to thought. 
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  • How Eurocentric Is Your Day? by M. Shahid Alam | P U L S E on 2009-11-09
    • I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?
    • I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.


      Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

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  • In Eastern Europe, People Pine for Socialism | CommonDreams.org on 2009-11-09
    • Twenty years after the fall of communism, Belene is largely forgotten -- only a small marble plaque tells its horrific story. And nostalgia for the past is growing in the small Balkan country and across the former Soviet bloc.

      Capitalism's failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.

    • "(The bad) things have been forgotten," said Rumen Petkov, 42, a former guard now clerk at the only prison still functioning on the Persin island.

      "The nostalgia is palpable, particularly among the elderly," he said, in front of the crumbling buildings of another old jail opened on the site after the camp was shut in 1959. The communists imprisoned dozens of ethnic Turks here in the 1980s when they refused to change their names to Bulgarian.

      Some young people in the impoverished town of Belene, linked to the island with a pontoon bridge, also reminisce: "We lived better in the past," said Anelia Beeva, 31.

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  • Religion a figment of human imagination by Andy Coghlan | New Scientist 28 April 2008 on 2009-11-08
    • Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.











      That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

    • Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.
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  • Did Evolution of Human Imagination 50,000 Years Ago Trigger Belief in God? | The Daily Galaxy on 2009-11-08
    • French-British anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, of the London School of Economics believes that humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. The development of imagination occurred at the time of the Upper Palaeolithic 'revolution' 40-50,000 years ago. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists (Image is prehistoric rock painting from south of Spain).
    • According to Bloch's theory, initially humans had to develop the essential brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't exist physically, and the possibility that people somehow survive on after their death.
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  • Nie kontrola, lecz chęć szczera on 2009-11-07
    • Pieniądze są ważnym motywatorem do pracy, ale wcale nie najważniejszym! Badania pokazują, że bardziej liczy się atmosfera w pracy. Jak się firma komunikuje z ludźmi, jaki wpływ oni mają na cele firmy, jakie są stosunki między współpracownikami. Finanse są dopiero na drugim miejscu.

      Na czym polega to dobre komunikowanie się?

      - Na szczerości po obu stronach. Precyzyjnym i jasnym formułowaniu oczekiwań. Jeśli komuś się nie podoba jakiś projekt, powinien to jasno komunikować, a nie powodować obstrukcję, czepiając się nieistotnych detali. I ważna jest informacja zwrotna. Powinno się ganić po cichu, a chwalić publicznie. Ale dla mnie to sztuczna sytuacja, raczej chwalę ludzi w cztery oczy.
    • A dobra atmosfera?

      - Pan pewnie ma na myśli miłe kolory na ścianach, firmowe przedszkola, zajęcia sportowe po godzinach, tworzenie firmowych portali społecznościowych albo fundacji, które mogą wspomóc pracownika w sytuacjach losowych. To tylko dodatki. Dobra atmosfera bierze się z jasnej komunikacji. Bo co z tego, że będzie kawiarnia, jeśli uzyskanie odpowiedzi zwrotnej z innego działu będzie trwało trzy miesiące.
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