Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

in English Language, Psychology | August 23rd, 2012

Steven Pinker is an exper­i­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist and one of the world’s fore­most writ­ers on lan­guage, mind, and human nature. Cur­rent­ly at Har­vard, Pinker has also taught at Stan­ford and MIT, and his research on visu­al cog­ni­tion and the psy­chol­o­gy of lan­guage has won prizes from the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion of Great Britain, the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety, and the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion.

This video (find part 1 above, part 2 below, and the tran­script here) is tak­en from a talk giv­en on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2008 at War­wick­’s Book­store in La Jol­la, Cal­i­for­nia. Here, we find Pinker talk­ing about his then new book, The Stuff of Thought: Lan­guage as a Win­dow into Human Nature, and doing what he does best: com­bin­ing psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science with lin­guis­tics. The result is as enter­tain­ing (and not safe for work) as it is insight­ful.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

This is What Oliver Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphetamines

in Psychology, Science | August 23rd, 2012

In this week’s issue of the New York­er, neu­rol­o­gist and writer Oliv­er Sacks has an arti­cle titled “Altered States.” Sub­ti­tled “Self-exper­i­ments in chem­istry,” it cov­ers, to be blunter, what Sacks expe­ri­enced and learned — or failed to learn, sub­stance depend­ing — when he began doing drugs.

His desire to con­duct these self-exper­i­ments flared up in his thir­ties, when, among oth­er sud­den jolts of curios­i­ty, he felt a sus­pi­cion that he had nev­er real­ly seen the col­or indi­go. “One sun­ny Sat­ur­day in 1964, I devel­oped a phar­ma­co­log­ic launch­pad con­sist­ing of a base of amphet­a­mine (for gen­er­al arousal), LSD (for hal­lu­cino­genic inten­si­ty), and a touch of cannabis (for a lit­tle added delir­i­um). About twen­ty min­utes after tak­ing this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, ‘I want to see indi­go now — now!’ ” The result­ing expe­ri­ence, and sure­ly many oth­ers besides, should appear in detail in Sacks’ upcom­ing book Hal­lu­ci­na­tions. While you need to sub­scribe to the mag­a­zine to read the New York­er piece, any­one can watch the video above, which spends a few min­utes with Sacks talk­ing about what drugs taught him about the brain.

Every sub­ject Sacks writes about seems to start with his inter­est in our unusu­al sen­so­ry expe­ri­ences and end in the organ­ic work­ings of our brains. His body of work com­pris­es books on migraine, encephali­tis, visu­al agnosia, deaf­ness, autism, col­or blind­ness, and var­i­ous oth­er per­cep­tu­al impair­ments. Think­ing back to his self-induced hal­lu­ci­na­tions, he remem­bers feel­ing that “the drugs might sen­si­tize me to expe­ri­ences of a sort my patients could have,” mak­ing him more empa­thet­ic to what they were going through. On the oth­er hand, he says, some drugs “gave me some very direct knowl­edge of what phys­i­ol­o­gists would call the reward sys­tems of the brain,” pro­duc­ing “intense plea­sure, some­times plea­sure of an almost orgas­mic degree, with no par­tic­u­lar con­tent,” the kind that made him fear he would become one of those famous lab rats with an elec­trode con­nect­ed to its brain’s plea­sure cen­ter, push­ing and push­ing the lever to stim­u­late that cen­ter to the very end. But he stepped back, observed, wrote, and avoid­ed that fate, or at least its equiv­a­lent in the human domain, liv­ing to tell the tale more elo­quent­ly than most any writer around.

(See also: more from Oliv­er Sacks on the New York­er’s Out Loud pod­cast.)

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stew­art

Oliv­er Sacks on the iPod

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

in Psychology, Science, Stanford, Television | August 22nd, 2012

Intel­li­gence comes at a price. The human species, despite its tal­ent for solv­ing prob­lems, has man­aged over the mil­len­nia to turn one of its most basic sur­vival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essen­tial­ly,” says Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make our­selves sick.”

In the 2008 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (above), Sapol­sky and fel­low sci­en­tists explain the dead­ly con­se­quences of pro­longed stress. “If you’re a nor­mal mam­mal,” Sapol­sky says, “what stress is about is three min­utes of scream­ing ter­ror on the savan­nah, after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.” Dur­ing those three min­utes of ter­ror the body responds to immi­nent dan­ger by deploy­ing stress hor­mones that stim­u­late the heart rate and blood pres­sure while inhibit­ing oth­er func­tions, like diges­tion, growth and repro­duc­tion.

The prob­lem is, human beings tend to secrete these hor­mones con­stant­ly in response to the pres­sures of every­day life. “If you turn on the stress response chron­i­cal­ly for pure­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons,” Sapol­sky told Mark Shwartz in a 2007 inter­view for the Stan­ford News Ser­vice, “you increase your risk of adult onset dia­betes and high blood pres­sure. If you’re chron­i­cal­ly shut­ting down the diges­tive sys­tem, there’s a bunch of gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders you’re more at risk for as well.”

Chron­ic stress has also been shown in sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies to dimin­ish brain cells need­ed for mem­o­ry and learn­ing, and to adverse­ly affect the way fat is dis­trib­uted in the body. It has even been shown to mea­sur­ably accel­er­ate the aging process in chro­mo­somes, a result that con­firms our intu­itive sense that peo­ple who live stress­ful lives grow old faster.

By study­ing baboon pop­u­la­tions in East Africa, Sapol­sky has found that indi­vid­u­als low­er down in the social hier­ar­chy suf­fer more stress, and con­se­quent­ly more stress-relat­ed health prob­lems, than dom­i­nant indi­vid­u­als. The same trend in human pop­u­la­tions was dis­cov­ered in the British White­hall Study. Peo­ple with more con­trol in work envi­ron­ments have low­er stress, and bet­ter health, than sub­or­di­nates.

Stress: Por­trait of a Killer is a fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant documentary–well worth the 52 min­utes it takes to watch.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sapol­sky Breaks Down Depres­sion

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Take the ‘Happiness Experiment’

in Philosophy, Psychology | August 1st, 2012

Hap­pi­ness is a state of mind. We all know that. But when it comes to decid­ing whether anoth­er per­son is tru­ly hap­py, our per­cep­tions are col­ored by our own states of mind–in par­tic­u­lar, by our  val­ue judg­ments. A per­son can have all the men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of a hap­py per­son, but if he or she is liv­ing what we con­sid­er a “bad life,” we are far less like­ly to judge that they are hap­py. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the same moral eval­u­a­tions do not seem to enter into our con­cept of unhap­pi­ness.

These are the find­ings of a trio of researchers at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty: Jonathan Phillips, Luke Mis­en­heimer and Joshua Knobe. You can read about the study in their paper, “The Ordi­nary Con­cept of Hap­pi­ness (And Oth­ers Like It),” pub­lished in the July, 2011 Emo­tion Review. The study is part of a new move­ment called Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy (or “x‑phi”), which goes beyond the philoso­pher’s tra­di­tion­al method of test­ing intuitions–a pri­ori con­cep­tu­al analysis–to use of the tools of cog­ni­tive sci­ence. You can learn more at the Yale Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy Web site, and take the enter­tain­ing video test above to get a taste of some of the coun­ter­in­tu­itive find­ings of x‑phi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Yale’s Open Cours­es Inspire a New Series of Old-Fash­ioned Books

Psy­chol­o­gy: Free Cours­es

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Benefits of Being Awestruck

in Psychology, Science, Video - Science | July 31st, 2012

http://vimeo.com/46264514

In Decem­ber 1972, astro­nauts aboard the Apol­lo 17 space­craft snapped a pho­to­graph of our Earth from an alti­tude of 45,000 kilo­me­tres. The pho­to­graph, known as “The Big Blue Mar­ble,” let every­one see their plan­et ful­ly illu­mi­nat­ed for the first time. The pic­ture, show­ing the Earth look­ing iso­lat­ed and vul­ner­a­ble, left every­one awestruck. And “The Big Blue Mar­ble” became the most wide­ly-dis­trib­uted image of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Now, less than a half cen­tu­ry lat­er, pic­tures of our plan­et bare­ly move us. And we hard­ly bat an eye­lash at videos giv­ing us remark­able views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.

We’re los­ing our sense of awe at our own per­il, how­ev­er. The title of a new Stan­ford study tells you all you need to know: Awe Expands People’s Per­cep­tion of Time, Alters Deci­sion Mak­ing, and Enhances Well-Being. Appar­ent­ly, watch­ing awe-inspir­ing vidoes makes you less impa­tient, more will­ing to vol­un­teer time to help oth­ers, more like­ly to pre­fer expe­ri­ences over mate­r­i­al prod­ucts, more present in the here and now, and hap­pi­er over­all. (More on that here.) All of this pro­vides film­mak­er Jason Sil­va the mate­r­i­al for yet anoth­er one of his “philo­soph­i­cal shots of espres­so,” The Bio­log­i­cal Advan­tage of Being Awestruck. It’s the first video above.

Find more awe in our col­lec­tion of Great Sci­ence Videos.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Discovered: Conversation with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Timothy Leary at Montreal Bed-In (1969)

in History, Music, Politics, Psychology | June 28th, 2012

On May 26, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko One began their sec­ond “Bed-In,” a form of anti-Viet­nam War protest that com­bined the media impact of a press con­fer­ence with the com­fort of hotel sheets. Their first Bed-In, which hap­pened in var­i­ous rooms of the Ams­ter­dam Hilton in late March of that year, saw them grant inter­view after inter­view about peace all day long with­out mov­ing from the bed in which they had ensconced them­selves. They’d sched­uled its fol­low up in New York City, but Lennon found he could­n’t enter the Unit­ed States due to a pre­vi­ous con­vic­tion for mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion. They relo­cat­ed it to the Bahamas, where the heat soon prompt­ed them to move again to the entire­ly cool­er Queen Eliz­a­beth Hotel in Mon­tre­al. There they record­ed the song “Give Peace a Chance,” aid­ed by such vis­i­tors as Tom­my Smoth­ers, Dick Gre­go­ry, Mur­ray the K, and psy­che­del­ic drug advo­cate Tim­o­thy Leary.

But Leary did­n’t just come to pro­vide a back­ing vocal. With his wife Rose­mary, he record­ed a con­ver­sa­tion with Lennon and Ono about… well, about a vari­ety of sub­jects, but they’d all fall under the broad head­ing of Leary’s one great pur­suit, “con­scious­ness.” Only recent­ly did Leary archivist Michael Horowitz dis­cov­er the tran­script of this ses­sion in “an unmarked enve­lope in a box of mis­cel­la­neous papers,” and this week the Tim­o­thy Leary Archives made it avail­able to the pub­lic for the first time ever. The con­ver­sa­tion begins with the fin­er points of teepee life, moves on to the effects of place on one’s state of mind, touch­es on both cou­ples’ hav­ing found them­selves on the wrong side of drug law enforce­ment, and ends with Lennon and Leary com­par­ing notes on how they use the media to con­vey their mes­sage:

TIMOTHY: John, about the use of the mass media … the kids must be taught how to use the media. Peo­ple used to say to me–I would give a rap and some­one would get up and say, “Well, what’s this about a reli­gion? Did the Bud­dha use drugs? Did the Bud­dha go on tele­vi­sion? I’d say, “Ahh—he would’ve. He would’ve….”

JOHN: I was on a TV show with David Frost and Yehu­di Menuhin, some cul­tur­al vio­lin­ist y’know, they were real­ly attack­ing me. They had a whole audi­ence and every­thing. It was after we got back from Amsterdam…and Yehu­di Menuhin came out, he’s always doing these Hin­du num­bers. All that pious bit, and his school for vio­lin­ists, and all that. And Yehu­di Menuhi said, “Well, don’t you think it’s nec­es­sary to kill some peo­ple some times?” That’s what he said on TV, that’s the first thing he’s ever said. And I said, “Did Christ say that? Are you a Chris­t­ian?” “Yeah,” I said, and did “Christ say any­thing about killing peo­ple?” And he said, “Did Christ say any­thing about tele­vi­sion? Or gui­tars?”

To learn more about Lennon and Ono’s Bed-Ins, you can vis­it the 70-minute doc­u­men­tary Bed Peace (below), pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture and still freely view­able on YouTube:

Relat­ed con­tent:

Tim­o­thy Leary’s Wild Ride and the Fol­som Prison Inter­view

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Bed Peace Star­ring John Lennon & Yoko Ono (Free for Lim­it­ed Time)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Bruce Springsteen Singin’ in the Rain in Italy, and How He Creates Powerful Imaginary Worlds

in Music, Psychology | June 27th, 2012

David Brooks, the sage New York Times op-ed writer, begins yes­ter­day’s thought piece, The Pow­er of the Par­tic­u­lar, with these lines:

They say you’ve nev­er real­ly seen a Bruce Spring­steen con­cert until you’ve seen one in Europe, so some friends and I threw finan­cial san­i­ty to the winds and went to fol­low him around Spain and France. In Madrid, for exam­ple, we were reward­ed with a show that last­ed 3 hours and 48 min­utes, pos­si­bly the longest Spring­steen con­cert on record and one of the best. But what real­ly fas­ci­nat­ed me were the crowds.…

Here were audi­ences in the mid­dle of the Iber­ian Penin­su­la singing word for word about High­way 9 or Greasy Lake or some oth­er exot­ic locale on the Jer­sey Shore. They held up signs request­ing songs from the deep­est and most dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can recess­es of Springsteen’s reper­toire.

The odd­est moment came mid­con­cert when I looked across the foot­ball sta­di­um and saw 56,000 enrap­tured Spaniards, pump­ing their fists in the air in fer­vent uni­son and bel­low­ing at the top of their lungs, “I was born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!” Did it occur to them at that moment that, in fact, they were not born in the U.S.A.?

Brooks goes on to explain this phe­nom­e­non by intro­duc­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal con­cept of “para­cosms,” which describes the cre­ation of pow­er­ful fan­ta­sy worlds. And he sug­gests that only the most dis­tinc­tive artists, the ones who come from a tru­ly par­tic­u­lar place, can cre­ate this spe­cial con­nec­tion with fans.  Spring­steen does just that. But part of his appeal is some­times his tran­scen­dence — his abil­i­ty to tran­scend his own music and embrace the uni­ver­sal spir­it of rock ‘n roll. Case in point: The Boss singing The Bea­t­les clas­sic “Twist and Shout” in Flo­rence ear­li­er this month. It’s rain­ing, rain­ing hard, but did any­one notice?

Thanks to Wired writer Steve Sil­ber­man for flag­ging that clip for us.…

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Sigmund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Private Life

in Psychology | May 22nd, 2012

Not long ago we post­ed the only known record­ing of Sig­mund Freud’s voice. Today we present rare home movies of the founder of mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy, cap­tured dur­ing the last decade of his life.

The scenes are nar­rat­ed by Freud’s youngest daugh­ter Anna, who allowed the footage to be shown only with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic com­mu­ni­ty before her death in 1982. The first scenes in the clip above were filmed in 1932 at Freud’s sum­mer home in Pöt­zleins­dorf, a sub­urb of Vien­na. He is shown vis­it­ing with his old friend Emanuel Löwy, an archae­ol­o­gist, and pet­ting his dog Jofi. The next sequence was shot between 1934 and 1937 at Freud’s lat­er sum­mer home in Grinz­ing, now a dis­trict of Vien­na. It shows Freud relax­ing with a book while his wife Martha and her sis­ter, Min­na Bernays, do their sewing. The movies were made by Freud’s friend and patient Mark Brunswick, hus­band of the psy­cho­an­a­lyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, a close asso­ciate of Freud’s.

You can watch the com­plete 24-minute film from which these scenes were tak­en on YouTube. And you can view or down­load a series of anno­tat­ed clips at the Freud Muse­um Web site.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast