Have you ever found that the more obsessed you become with a certain topic, the more references to it keep spontaneously appearing in your life? That’s what’s been happening to me over the past few weeks, as I’ve spent just about every free moment preparing and polishing my TED talk. The talk is a celebration of one of [...]
Posts Tagged ‘literature’
Why I Love and Hate "Game"
February 14th, 2012 
The Connectome Yes, it’s that special time of year again – time for flamboyant bouquets and chalky candy to appear at office desks – time for Facebook pages to drown in cloying iconography – time for self-labeled “forever aloners” to dredge the back alleys of OKCupid in last-ditch desperation – and time for me to load up my trusty gatling [...]
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured 
Tags: biology, emotions, evolution, learning, literature, psychology, sex 
5 Comments »Harry Potter and the Nature of the Self
November 19th, 2011 The Connectome Yup, this is what we’re doing today. I finally got to see Deathly Hallows Part 2, and it got me thinking about neuroscience like frickin’ everything always does, and I came home and wrote an essay about the nature of consciousness in the Harry Potter universe. And we’re going to talk about it, because it’s [...]
Posted in Feature Stories Tags: consciousness, emotions, literature, memory, psychology, senses, vision 3 Comments »Ruining the Ending
August 12th, 2011 The Connectome Plot spoilers don’t seem to hurt our enjoyment of movies or books at all, a new study shows – in fact, they actually increase our pleasure. What a twist! In a series of experiments, volunteers consistently rated short stories as significantly more enjoyable when they got to read a spoiler-y intro, or when spoilers were inserted [...]
The Fascination of the Abomination
June 7th, 2011 The Connectome a.k.a. “From Blackwood to Coppola: Apocalypse Now as Weird Tale” Have you ever watched a movie that was so scary you couldn’t look away? For as long as I can remember – and probably longer – I’ve been intrigued by monsters. At preschool age, I possessed what my parents called an “overactive imagination,” and a [...]
Digitoneurolinguistic Hacking
February 16th, 2011 The Connectome In view of all the seriousness I’ve been writing about lately, I decided it was time to post an XKCD comic that made me laugh so hard I snorted hot chocolate through my nose. Click the image below to embiggen! Here’s a short blog post that explains a little more about digitoneurolinguistic hacking. It seems [...]
