tumble77

What does this audiovisual experience make you feel?

“ As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor… the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time. These ‘command centers,’ for lack of a more accurate but succinct term, do one thing really well: They create our sense of self, our sense of being a protagonist in a continuously unfolding nonlinear narrative through which we can travel again and again in our memories and plan possible and even impossible futures.

— The science of waking up, from Antonio Damasio’s excellent Self Comes to Mind – an exploration of what makes us human. (via)

(Source: curiositycounts)

“ Compared with uninfected people of the same sex, infected men were more likely to wear rumpled old clothes; infected women tended to be more meticulously attired, many showing up for the study in expensive, designer-brand clothing. Infected men tended to have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more.

—

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

Kathleen McAuliffe speaks with Jaroslave Flegr for The Atlantic

In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.

» How to Approach a Responsive Design

alexislloyd:

A very thorough and informative discussion of the responsive design process for The Boston Globe redesign.

unicef:

UNICEF: oneminutesjr.- Happiness (by unicef)

This video was created by Mary Mubarak. She is 15 years old and lives in South Sudan. Created at the 2010 oneminutesjr. Southern Sudan workshop.

To Learn more…please visit:
http://www.unicef.org/videoaudio/video_42432.html

(via darksilenceinsuburbia)

Volkwagen Advertising from 1969

(Source: jaymug)

“ All I want in life is security and freedom. Which is the weirdest balance. But you’re in this group, so you feel secure, but you’re flying every day and so you feel free. You know what I mean?

— George Gurley on the Gumball 3000 Rally, writing for Vanity Fair

Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.
—Stanley Kubrick (Hat tip to John Gruber)

(via smarterthaniam)

Douglas Coupland on the 21st century state of mind

» Laura Dekker vows never to return home

for fear of “being taken into care” by Dutch child services for having become the youngest person to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe against their wishes.

FATHER: Such a long time at sea by herself, with wind, rain and waves, she will be cured.
DAUGHTER: No, I have an appetite for more …

The Believer spoke over the phone with Joan Didion

JD: I think it develops into a fairly stable thing over time. I think it’s not at all stable at first. But then you kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself.
BLVR: How do you gauge the distance between the role you have made for yourself—
JD: —and the real person?
BLVR: Yeah.
JD: Well, I don’t know. The real person becomes the role you have made for yourself.

» Sci-Fi Writer William Gibson Speaks Easy

» Where the Generals Meditate …

WIRED goes inside the Pentagon’s Alt-Medicine Mecca.

» Violet Blue on Depression, Suicide and Asperger’s

I was always struck by the immense pressure the Stanford students felt to keep the illusion that they were doing well. We would refer to it as the Stanford Duck Syndrome: everyone gave the illusion that they were gliding elegantly across the water, but nobody could see that beneath the surface they were paddling like crazy to keep up.

My observation is that many people in tech culture experience similar pressure to maintain a public image. They are fearful of exposing their vulnerabilities to others or asking for help.