• 5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think: Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
  • Scientists find weird new property of matter that breaks all the rules: The new theory of order, which involves the spin of electrons, breaks double time reversal symmetry and exhibits quadruple time reversal symmetry.
  • THE CYCLES OF CHAOS: DECONSTRUCTING INITIATION: St. John of the Cross, a Christian mystic, wrote of this experience as “(it)…puts the sensory spiritual appetites to sleep, deadens them, and deprives them of the ability to find pleasure in anything. It binds the imagination, and impedes it from doing any good discursive work. It makes the memory cease, the intellect become dark and unable to understand anything, and hence it causes the will to become arid and constrained, and all the faculties empty and useless. And over this hangs a dense and burdensome cloud, which afflicts the soul, and keeps it withdrawn from God”.

  • “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”: Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment?
  • More human than human: how Philip K. Dick can change your life: You might note that, alongside Dickensian and Kafkaesque, we now have an adjective to describe this state of affairs. Phildickian. And the world seems more phildickian every day.