15m animation based on Bernice Eisenstein’s graphic memoir.
Born to Auschwitz survivor parents, aged 11 she becomes obsessed—addicted—to the holocaust, trying to give the second-hand trauma of their tragic past a place in her own, non-tragic present:
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Universal cool
Research suggests there is remarkable commonality across 12 countries about the traits that are considered cool, identifying these six—extraversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness, openness to experience, and autonomy:
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Responding to challenges from readers to his categorical argument that “Fallacies Don’t Exist”, @maartenboudry.bsky.social clarifies that most alleged fallacies—like biases—are evolutionary adaptations, and often called out in a partisan fashion. Makes good sense to me:
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When are crowd wiser than independent individuals?
Research by Becker et al suggests the way group members’ prior beliefs interact with emerging network structures in the group moderate the effect of communication on belief formation:
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Without clearly answering the ‘when’ question, our assertions why we do something, or why we condemn someone else’s actions, it’s just rhetoric.
And not everyone takes that seriously.
Read on for more:
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In the right quantity, stress is good, but too much and it drains your energy.
Find out why and how that happens, and what we can do to optimize the amount of stress:
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Barbershopkoren steunen op aangeleerde patronen bij het zingen van hun close harmony muziek.
Maar als hun partituur niet beantwoordt aan de gebruikelijke patronen, is het knoeien—een mooie illustratie hoe we leren en beslissen.
Mijn @apache_be stukje:
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Is the US an outlier where polarization is concerned?
New research suggests the increasing division around political and social issues exhibited in America over the last two decades is not happening globally:
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Winter is coming to an end in the northern hemisphere, and animals such as bears come out of hibernation.
Only, contrary to common wisdom, bears don't actually technically hibernate. And what they do instead can provide insights for human health:
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A 3D-printed wheelchair… for a turtle!
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How to conduct a survey about sex fetishes?
@aella.bsky.social tells the story of how curiosity made up for lack of academic credentials in her Big Kink Survey, 700,000+ participants—60x the famous Kinsey Report (!)
[The Kin(k)sey Report?—I’ll get me coat]:
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What is behind our morbid curiosity—from rubber necking at car crashes and true crime documentaries to doomscrolling?
New research suggests it might be an adaptation conferring survival advantage:
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Research by Fulgu & Capraro finds that, to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, GPT-4 judges
• abusing a man as more appropriate than abusing a woman (no ∆ for torturing)
•a woman using violence against a man is acceptable but not the reverse:
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Tough question—all the more so because different people respond differently to the same acute situation.
A missing cat anecdote illustrates:
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Blogged: When
Sometimes we change our mind. Sometimes we castigate others for their actions. But unless we also answer one simple question, all we do is show that we haven’t thought our position through:
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Research by Rosi et al examines whether we find recordings of our own voice attractive or not, and suggests it depends.
When we recognize it, we find it *more* attractive than other voices, when we don’t we find it less attractive:
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The game theory of flattery
Flatterer and flatteree (flattee?) find themselves in a prisoners’ dilemma:
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Many of Carl Sagan’s fellow scientists took a dim view of his relentless popularizing of science.
This somewhat elitist attitude was a mistake, argues @steropo—it is good for science to connect with broad audiences:
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HT @docgrawitch
The longevity business, offering treatments like the 45-minute “cellular repair” session (with an eye watering $1,300 price tag), is growing fast.
So is the gap between what it promises and what the science actually backs up:
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Unusual, but accurate (and entertaining).
The basses of a barbershop harmony chorus experience first hand the limits of our otherwise spectacular learning and decision making ability.
ICYMI, last call for my post, The unlearnable song:
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Competing cooperators
Sure, as we became more social we learned to cooperate and reap the benefits.
But that narrative is not complete (and a bit rose-tinted). When no one’s looking, our instinct is still to compete, argues Jonathan R Goodman:
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1 in 3 Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime.
Research by @matthewibillet.bsky.social et al suggests the beliefs are present and diverse (eg how?) across religious/non-religious groups, and predict risk perception/tolerance and support for extreme action:
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‘Ego depletion’—willpower as a muscle that can get fatigued—does not survive scrutiny.
A better way to consider willpower, argues Alberto De Luca, is ‘metacontrol theory’—not mental *resources* but mental *modes*: persistence, and flexibility.
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Grandparents caring for their grandchildren scored higher on memory and verbal fluency tests, compared with those who didn’t—after adjusting for factors like age and health, research on nearly 3000 English grandparents 2016-2022 finds:
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Adding “…including women and children” when referring to victims of violence boosts outrage, research by Grigoreva Crean et al finds,
The ‘women’ reference contributes independent of ‘children’ and of associations with motherhood:
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More evidence that conscious perception emerges from a constant brain-body dialogue—new research suggests people’s heart rate drops just before they notice they make a mistake in a visual task:
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via @psypost.bsky.social
The shrimp that packs a punch also carries a shield for defence in one-on-one combat.
Mantis shrimp can whack like few others—prey and predator, but also rivals over shelter, and that shock-absorbing shield comes in handy, as high-speed footage shows:
www.popsci.com/environment/...
Social media’s effect on public opinion was to shift influence away from ‘elite’ experts to ordinary Jacks and Jills.
But, argues @danwphilosophy.bsky.social , AI will make the pendulum swing back the other way to some degree, and reshape public opinion:
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Parents of a baby cannot avoid regular exposure to, um, bodily effluvia of various kinds.
Might that lower their general disgust for disgusting stuff?
Yes, but… only once their baby is being weaned and starting to eat solids, new research suggests:
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