{ Aaron Siskind, Martha’s Vineyard, 1954 | scanned from American Photography 1890-1965: From the Museum of Modern Art New York }

related { Jasper Johns, Painting with Two Balls, 1960 }

Dream content studies have revealed that dream experiences are negatively biased; negative dream contents are more frequent than corresponding positive dream contents. It is unclear, however, whether the bias is real or due to biased sampling, i.e., selective memory for intense negative emotions.

The threat simulation theory (TST) claims that the negativity bias is real and reflects the evolved biological function of dreaming.

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis of the TST that threatening events are overrepresented in dreams, i.e., more frequent and more severe in dreams than in real life.

To control for biased sampling, we used as a baseline the corresponding negative events in real life rather than the corresponding positive events in dreams. We collected dream reports and daily event logs from 39 university students during a two-week period, and interviewed them about real threat experiences retrievable from autobiographical memory. Threat experiences proved to be much more frequent and severe in dreams than in real life. We conclude that the TST’s predictions hold, and that the negativity bias is real.

{ via InformaWorld }

photo { Alex Sturrock }

I bought a stereo. Wow! Two speakers!

So I’m listening to this thing. And then I heard the quad system with the four speakers, and I said, “This is it, this is great.”

So I got rid of the stereo and got the quad, and this was the sound I was looking for.

But I listened to it a couple of days and said, “Hey, this sounds like shit.”

So I went out and I got the duodecaphonic with the 12 speakers, and this was more to my liking… for a while.

But the ear gets sophisticated pretty fast and I got rid of that and got the milliphonic with the thousand speakers. And I’m listening to it and I said, Hey, this sounds like shit too. The other one was shit one, this is shit two.

So finally I got the googlephonic, the highest number of speakers before infinity. Sounds like shit.

So I said, “Hey, maybe it’s the needle.”

So I had the old typical diamond needle, and I searched around, finally got the moonrock needle. Cost me 3 million bucks for that. So now I have a googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle.

It’s okay for a car stereo. I wouldn’t want it in my house.

{ Steve Martin, 1979 }

photo { Richard Prince, Untitled (Party), 1993 }

It’s a strange finding nestled inside a weird phenomenon: children are 50 percent more likely than adults to respond favorably to placebos.

So concludes a Public Library of Science Medicine review by French pediatricians of anti-epilepsy drug studies. If replicated in other drugs, researchers may need to adjust their analyses of clinical drug studies involving kids.

What could account for the tendency of kids to feel better after taking a drug designed to do nothing? The reasons, write the researchers, “remain largely unknown and mostly speculative.”

{ Wired | Continue reading }

Millions of Indian viewers will today be able to watch the moment when Jade Goody, the loud-mouthed British reality TV star, is told by her doctor that she is suffering from cervical cancer.

Goody, 27, received the diagnosis while appearing on Bigg Boss, the Indian version of Big Brother. After speaking to her consultant in the UK by telephone in the Diary Room, she reportedly burst into tears and told her housemates: “I have cancer”.

She immediately quit the show. (…) There was some confusion about whether the Diary Room footage would be aired but a source at Endemol, the show’s creators, said today that Goody had given her consent for it to be broadcast.

{ Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Kuan TechHarn }

related { One of the decisions confronting the parents of young teenage girls is whether to agree to give them the vaccine for human papillomavirus, which prevents cervical cancer. }

My sense is that we probably aren’t even past the halfway point yet of this recession, the credit losses or the house price deflation. Looking at whether equities may have bottomed or not on an intermediate basis, maybe the recent action to the negative side was an important inflection. In terms of what I do, which is trying to tie the macro into the markets, I have a very tough time believing that we have reached anything close to a fundamental low, either in the S&P 500 or in the long-bond yield, for that matter.

We’re in a very confusing atmosphere. People didn’t really know what to make of a 300-point rally in the Dow the other day, but my main message was that 300point rallies from the Dow don’t happen in bull markets. In fact, they never happened in the bull market from October ‘02 to October ‘07, but it has happened 6 times in this bear market and happened 12 times in the last bear market. You don’t get moves like that in bull markets. As Rich Bernstein has said time and again, “This is the hallmark of a recession and a hallmark of a bear market.” (…)

The very next day we got nonfarm payrolls. It prints down 51,000 and frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it was below or above Wall Street expectations. The bottom line is that employment is down seven months in a row. In 60 years of sifting through the data here, that’s never happened before without the economy being in a classic recession. (…)

This is an epic period. We are living through history. People will be writing about this in the future, no different than they wrote about the 1920s and the 1930s. Chapter one of the book was the end of the residential construction bubble, which I would tag as the first quarter of 2006, when housing started to peak and began to roll over at 2.3 million units. I continue to look back at that, 2.3 million units.

The natural level of demographic demand for housing in this country is annual demand of 1.45 million units. From 2003 until 2007, builders added on average nearly 2 million residential units per year, or 30% more, than the natural demand could absorb, because, of course, we were in a new paradigm. So the builders were building homes and condos as if we had the same demographics as the 1970s when the Boomers were buying their first refrigerator. This is a case of Global Crossing meeting D.R. Horton, and we are paying the price for that, even today.

Chapter two of the book was the end of the home-price bubble, and I would date that to the first quarter of 2007 when the Case-Shiller Index began to deflate year over year. Now, I want to make this point, and I want to make this point emphatically. Home prices in this country on average rose 20% per year for six years. That has never happened before. When you take a look at home prices in real terms, they’re still more than 30% higher today than they were when this mania morphed into a bubble back in 2001. So to those people who are thinking that we’re only 5% away from the low, I’d say I don’t think so. Make no mistake that there is going to be more deflation in home prices ahead - I think significant deflation - just as Freddie Mac put us on notice yesterday.

{ David A. Rosenberg, North American Economist for Merrill Lynch | via InvestorsInsight | Continue reading }

{ Seidl Confiserie ad, 2008 | “All the nuts in the world in finest chocolate.” | Serviceplan München/Hamburg, Germany }

{ Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996 }

related { more advertising devastation }

Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.

To study storytelling, scientists must first define what constitutes a story, and that can prove tricky. Because there are so many diverse forms, scholars often define story structure, known as narrative, by explaining what it is not. Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations.

However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism—recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters.

“Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,” says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. “We can tell when something rings false.”

But the best stories—those retold through generations and translated into other languages—do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call “narrative transport.” (…)

Empathy is part of the larger ability humans have to put themselves in another person’s shoes: we can attribute mental states—awareness, intent—to another entity. Theory of mind, as this trait is known, is crucial to social interaction and communal living—and to understanding stories.

Children develop theory of mind around age four or five. (…) Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.

But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone’s reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we’ve grown close.

“Trust is the baseline,” says Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton University. “Trustworthiness is the very first thing that we decide about a person, and once we’ve decided, we do all kinds of elaborate gymnastics to believe in people.” (…)

Why trust exists in the first place has been something of a puzzle for scholars of human behavior. Evolutionary biologists (and economists) have traditionally assumed that people are self-interested, concerned only with maximizing their own well-being and passing on their genes to succeeding generations. That model doesn’t leave much room for trust - why would we assume that someone would act on our behalf rather than simply his own?

Yet human society would not function without trust. We loan things to friends, we take to the road assuming our fellow drivers are not suicidal, we get on airplanes piloted by people we’ve never seen before, and, when asked to sign something, we rarely read the fine print. If people stopped to double-check the background and references of everyone they had an interaction with, social life would slow to a standstill. (…)

When deciding who to trust, the research suggests, people use shortcuts. For example, they look at faces. According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton’s psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone’s trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot.

By studying people’s reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy [illustration].

In a paper published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy (…) and an exaggerated “untrustworthy” face looks angry - with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with “trustworthy” faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us. (…) In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.

Another set of cues, and a particularly powerful one, is body language. Mimicry, in particular, seems to put us at our ease. Recent work by Tanya Chartrand, a psychology professor at Duke, and work by Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee, media scholars at Stanford, have shown that if a person, or even a computer-animated figure, mimics our movements while talking to us, we will find our interlocutor significantly more persuasive and honest.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

In 1962, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles, where, after a halfhearted foray into commercial art, he attended the Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts). He became excited by the antagonistic avant-gardism of L.A.-based international artists such as Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. He joined a scene that was both laid-back and irascible. “If you showed more often than every three years, no one took you seriously,” he said. “Some people worked and worked and never showed at all. That’s what I come from.” (…)

At one point during our meanderings, Hammons went into a bodega on First Avenue and bought a box of rice. A few minutes later, as we were passing a church, he said, “Watch this,” and tossed a few handfuls of grain on the steps. I said, “Who’s getting married?” He said, “The wedding was earlier. We missed it.” At the time, I found the stunt hokey, but now I can’t shake a vision of that forlorn bit of evidence of a wedding that never took place. Hammons married young, and he has two adult children. Divorced in the early seventies, he has never remarried. “As an artist, you have to keep reinventing yourself,” he said. “In a marriage, you have to be consistent. It’s difficult.”

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

artwork { David Hammons, Out of Bounds, 1995-96 | dirt on paper in artist’s frame, with basketball | MoMA }

{ Jason Florio | Photoshelter Prints }

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.

In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies.

They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person’s state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision.

On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with “pharmacological land mines” that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says.

“The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects,” the report states.

The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person’s ability to tell a lie.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }