Tokyo Transsexual Cooks and Serves His Own Genitals at Public “Ham Cybele” Banquet.
We initially started looking at sentimental objects, the emergence of this bizarre behavior that you find in children in the West. They form these emotional attachments to blankets and teddy bears and it initially starts off as an associative learning type of situation where they need to self-soothe, because in the West we typically separate children, for sleeping purposes, between one and two years of age. In the Far East they don’t, they keep children well into middle childhood, so they don’t have as much attachment object behavior. [Bruce Hood/Edge]
A Swedish word for love, “kär-lek [love–play]” gave an impetus for this article that aims at defining two mysterious and fascinating phenomena: love and play. They are analogous by many of their features. It is difficult to define them comprehensively and they both develop individually and in stages. Furthermore, as we tried to create an overall picture about these phenomena, we found many combining questions: where does love/play start and to what extent imagination maintains both these phenomena? Both love and play involves joy and pleasure but also insecurity and risks. Or do they both consist merely of work, learning, and practicing? People’s ability to play and love does not disappear with age. Is love thus play and play love? [Maxwell Scientific Organization]
Many of the great clinicians who studied psychosis in the last two hundred years became famous for their specific nosologic contribution when they sought to define and uncover specific psychotic entities or illnesses. Other clinicians owed their fame to their description of certain original symptoms of psychosis. However, when possible, few of them were able to avoid the temptation to formulate their own nosology, and subsequently engage in scholastic disputes in defending their findings. Insofar as a clinical approach to psychosis implies a high focus on symptomatology, few researchers and clinicians would attempt to formulate a global system to define and explain psychotic symptomatology and the mechanisms for the production of psychotic symptoms. Many of those who did attempt to do so failed because they were unable to reconcile what seemed to be contradictory concepts, or because they often failed to coherently recognize, define and categorize the disparate symptoms of psychosis. However, one clinician was able to succeed. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault was able to formulate an exhaustive and coherent system of psychotic symptom categorization. As a result, in retrospect, Clérambault would most likely emerge as one of the most prominent figures of descriptive psychopathology of psychosis. [Paul Hriso]
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I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. [Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, 1947]
No one personifies the thorny entanglement between modernism and the science of the soul better than Dr. Gaston Ferdière, the psychiatrist who administered no less than 58 electroshock treatments to the Surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud during the Second World War. [Yale University, | PDF]
Do facts exist? At least one person has claimed that facts do not exist and that thinking they exist would violate Occam’s razor. [Ethical Realism]
The self-punishment we learn as children may continue into adulthood, when we become, in effect, parents to ourselves. Although some adults are more prone to self-flagellation than others, this tendency appears to be common even among psychologically healthy individuals. Research conducted in the field of social psychology suggests at least three major reasons why people might, at times, choose to punish themselves. [Psych Your Mind]
In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both ironic twist stories and mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.” [NY Times]
Imagine how horrific life would be when you are convinced to be dead, while you are still alive. This delusional belief of non-existence characterizes sufferers of the rare mental disorder Cotard Delusion. Slight variations include those that believe they are rotting or have lost their blood or internal organs. [United Academics]
Research team at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre has revealed how experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals. The results revealed that especially feeling strong unpleasant emotions synchronized brain’s emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. On the contrary, experiencing highly arousing events synchronized activity in the networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch. [Aalto University]
Great ideas come when you aren’t trying. […] A study suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration — rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander. [Nature]
Are energy drinks capable of pushing some people into caffeine-induced psychotic states?
A team of researchers reports that land-based water storage could account for 42%,of the observed sea-level rise between 1961 and 2003. Of that amount, the extraction of groundwater for irrigation and home and industrial use, with subsequent run-off to rivers and eventually to the oceans, represents the bulk of the contribution. [Nature]
Just a couple of weeks ago, we discussed a Chinese experiment in which physicists teleported photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometres. That’s almost an order of magnitude more than previous records. Today, European physicists say they’ve broken the record again, this time by teleporting photons between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife off the Atlantic coast of north Africa, a distance of almost 150 kilometres. [The Physics arXiv Blog]
By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. [SAGE | PDF]
Human beings are motivated to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. In this context, self-presentation and self-disclosure have been described as strategies to initiate the formation of relationships: Especially in early stages, people have to attract the attention of others by means of self-presentational behavior. Therefore, presenting him- or herself in a positive and elaborated way can be seen as one way to establish new contacts and thereby satisfy the so-called need to belong. The term “impression management” aptly describes this strategy “to convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.” In real-life situations, these impression management behaviors consist of intentional verbal communication (speech, written texts) as well as of possibly unintentional nonverbal expressions. Nowadays, with the help of social networking sites (SNS) on the Internet such as Facebook, further possibilities are given to present oneself to others. […] An analysis of 100 online profiles showed that singles disclosed more photographs of themselves on their profiles than people in relationships. The highest numbers of friends and wall postings were shown by people who did not reveal their relationship status. Singles displayed more groups on their profile and were more likely to join user groups dealing with parties, sexual statements as well as fun and nonsense. [Cyberpsychology]
Multiple Maniacs is a 1970 comedy film by American filmmaker John Waters. [...] Plot: Lady Divine is the owner and operator of a show called The Cavalcade of Perversion, a free exhibit of various perversions and fetish acts and obscenities such as the “Puke Eater.” The show is free, although the various performers must persuade and even physically drag reluctant passers-by to attend. As a finale to every show, Lady Divine comes in and robs the patrons at gunpoint. This arrangement seems successful to Lady Divine’s lover, Mr. David, until Lady Divine becomes bored with the routine, and decides to murder the patrons rather than merely robbing them. [Wikipedia]
- Who do we have here? - This is Eddie. We’re just cruising. He’s a dude magnet. My office is on Wall Street, and if I’m with Eddie, guys just surround me. They say, “Oh my God, I used to have one of these when I was living in the country!” Or whatever. - I doubt that short dress hurts. - I don’t know. No one talks to me unless I’m with the dog. [NY mag]
I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. […] Everywhere I look artists seem to be working more for less money. [David Lowery/The Trichordist]
There are several trends that might suggest a diminishing role for mathematics in engineering work. First, there is the rise of software engineering as a separate discipline. It just doesn’t take as much math to write an operating system as it does to design a printed circuit board. Programming is rigidly structured and, at the same time, an evolving art form—neither of which is especially amenable to mathematical analysis. [IEEE]
If you are an IPO company founder and — even more explicitly — you are Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you want your share price on the first day to go exactly nowhere, which is what Facebook did. That means no money was left on the table and the company got the best possible deal. […] I’m sure there was a struggle at the end over how to price the offering. The bankers would have preferred $34 or even $32, but Facebook went for $38 and they were correct to do so from their point of view because we now see it was the optimal solution. [Cringely]
Facebook is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web. […] The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. [Technology Review]
Texting Drivers Take Eyes Off Road 5 Seconds On Average: Study. Even talking proved to be dangerous.
Microsoft tops the list of companies making the most requests to Google to takedown copyrighted material. [PC Pro]
Journalists develop new units of measure to explain complex and elusive concepts. The unit he shared, which he credits to Salopek, is the Jolie. A Jolie is a unit that denotes the amount of international aid a country receives when it becomes the cause celebre of a prominent celebrity. He offers a working definition as the difference between aid per person to Darfur, which benefits from Jolie’s focus and advocacy, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has not. […] The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. [Ethan Zuckerman]
Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States armed forces in mid-2002, likely the largest such exercise in history. The exercise cost $250 million, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. […] Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, used old methods to evade Blue’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World War II light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. … In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces’ electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. […] Another significant portion of Blue’s navy was “sunk” by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue’s inability to detect them as well as expected. At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue’s ships were “re-floated”, and the rules of engagement were changed. … The war game was forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. […] Red Force was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and Red Force was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore. […] I’ve now heard personally from enough independent expert insider sources that I’m willing to post it: the above example was not a rare exception; war games are mostly fake. [OvercomingBias]
A Psycho-Historical Analysis of Adolf Hitler: The Role of Personality, Psychopathology, and Development [PDF]
Interview with Nick Bostrom: We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction. Related: The Great Filter.
The last time I saw paintings as deluded as Damien Hirst’s latest works, the artist’s name was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. […] There is a pathos about Two Weeks One Summer, in which Hirst shows paintings of parrots and lemons, shark’s jaws and foetuses in jars in a vast space in White Cube Bermondsey. It is the same kind of pathos that clings to dictators’ art. This is the kind of kitsch that is foisted on helpless peoples by Neros and Hitlers and such tyrants so beyond normal restraint or criticism they believe they are artists. [Jonathan Jones/Guardian]
Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1956-57 on view at the MoMA until June 4.
Robert Glasper, Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Is drinking through your nose dangerous?