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According to researchers from the University of Bonn, non-smokers thinking of taking up the habit might think twice when they look at those pictures, but it’s going to require more than scare tactics to change the ways of chronic smokers.
For environmentalists trying to use entertainment to shape broad public attitudes and behaviors, nothing could be more important than understanding how to reach these hard-to-get people. Something that will speak to them, something that will change their minds, and most importantly, something that will incite them to action. A documentary might not be that something.
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Environmental films tend to “draw a pretty pre-disposed audience,” said Susi Moser, a fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and climate change communications specialist. A 2010 study on The Age of Stupid (a hybrid documentary, drama, and animation on climate change) found that most filmgoers were already quite concerned about climate change, and motivated to mitigate it, even before seeing the film. For audiences that are already devoted to an environmental cause, these films merely confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
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Documentary film director Louie Psihoyos anticipated this problem when he directed The Cove, a 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about mass dolphin hunting in Japan. His solution was to model the film after a popular Hollywood blockbuster.
“We wanted to do a ‘making-of’ style film that felt like Ocean’s Eleven,” he said. “That was a way in — to tell a dark story in a popular way.”
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Damasio has a new book coming out this week, and it’s his most ambitious work yet. In Self Comes To Mind, Damasio seeks to explain how the primordial elements of the mind – all these body maps and recursive loops – get transformed into conscious experience, into that metaphysical figment we call the self. It’s a lucid and important work, and scrambles all the conventional categories of the brain. It turns out that the “higher” parts of the cortex are inseparable from the “lower” parts, and that “you” – the “you” reading these words – emerge in large part from the brain stem, the nub of tissue just above the spinal cord. We arise, in other words, from the place were brain and body meet, where flesh and feeling are emulsified together
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On average, people have to turn over about 50 cards before they began to draw solely from the profitable decks. Logic is slow.
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What the scientists found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hands of the experimental subjects got “nervous” whenever they reached for the negative decks. Although the subjects still had little inkling of which card piles were the most lucrative, their emotions had developed an accurate sense of fear. They knew which decks were dangerous. In other words, their feelings figured out the game first – the hand was leading the brain.
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Domestic chickens display signs of empathy, the ability to ''feel another's pain'' that is at the heart of compassion, a study has found.
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When chicks were exposed to puffs of air, they showed signs of distress that were mirrored by their mothers. The hens' heart rate increased, their eye temperature lowered - a recognised stress sign - and they became increasingly alert. Levels of preening were reduced, and the hens made more clucking noises directed at their chicks.
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Researcher Jo Edgar, from the School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: ''The extent to which animals are affected by the distress of others is of high relevance to the welfare of farm and laboratory animals.
''Our research has addressed the fundamental question of whether birds have the capacity to show empathic responses.
columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences -- insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge. In a talk full of humor, he shows how you can't hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness.
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