Steps Toward Excellence
Physicist Richard Feynman
Seeing Our World
Vision seems so simple. We open our eyes and there is the world. Yet scientists have long appreciated how difficult this is to explain.
For a start, we move our eyes about five or six times a second, fixating on something and then moving quickly on, but we don’t notice this, and the world appears stable. Also, what we can see clears only a tiny area around that fixation point, yet it feels as though we are seeing the whole scene at once.
Zen and the Art of Consciousness
Susan Blackmore
Our Place in the Universe
Modern astronomy has given us a perspective on our place in the universe. Life is a fragile development in an air pocket on the surface of Earth, a small planet revolving around a minor star in a galaxy of trillions of stars in a world of billions of galaxies.
Competing Agendas
Our fate is intertwined with our planetary air pocket and the life that shares it. Within the “small space” many competing agendas bump up against each other — species against species, group against group, individual against individual.
Importance of Life
If humans are important, it is because we are important to ourselves. And, if life is important, it is because life is important to us.
Staying Sane in a Crazy World
Sherwin Wine
Pervasiveness of Laughter
Laughter has been considered one of the primitive emotions recognized in every culture. Of all the different emotional expressions, laughter is one of the few that adults who have been deaf and blind from birth can generate. Although we all have moments of solitary experience, laughter is predominantly a social phenomenon that has its roots both in early human development and also early in the development of our species.
Thinking of Others
We like to laugh and make others laugh. Not only does laughter have a multitude of benefits in terms of coping with stress and illness, but it works to bind individuals together in social coalitions. It is a deeply emotional response activated by the emotional regions of the amygdala and associated with brain networks, but it operates in conjunction with higher-order processes related to social cognition — thinking about others.
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity
Bruce Hood
Age of Science
The age of science is the knowledge revolution of the last four centuries.
The scientific revolution was characterized by four traumatic innovations:
Staying Sane in a Crazy World
Sherwin Wine
Who Knows Anyhow? 