The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Comedy, Life, Psychology | ≅ 2 Comments
During the 1960s, George Carlin had something of an epiphany. Confronted by the counterculture, the young comedian realized that he wasn’t staying true to himself — that he was trying to be Danny Kaye, a very mainstream star, when he was really an outlaw and a rebel at heart. (Watch him on The Tonight Show [...]
≡ Category: Psychology, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you attended the recent Society for Neuroscience conference, you had the chance to see some unprecedented 3D imaging of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which women’s brain regions (80 in total) are activated in the sequence leading to an orgasm. For Barry Komisaruk (professor of psychology at Rutgers University), this [...]
≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ 3 Comments
The mind, they say, is a house divided: The right hemisphere of the brain is predominantly intuitive; the left, predominantly rational. In his recent book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the British psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist looks at the evolution of Western Civilization through [...]
≡ Category: Life, Literature, Psychology | ≅ 1 Comment
Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World in 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-born writer was living in Italy at the time, a continental intellectual par excellence. Then, six years later, Huxley turned all of this upside down. He [...]
≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
This vintage stunt from a 1962 episode of Candid Camera makes for a good laugh. But it also captures something important about human psychology — something that social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment, describes on a website related to his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He [...]
≡ Category: History, Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
In July, the Edge.org held its annual “Master Class” in Napa, California and brought together some influential thinkers to talk about “The Science of Human Nature.” The highlights included: Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the [...]
≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Back in 1970, three psychology professors pulled off a hoax that doubled as medical research. They brought Dr. Myron L. Fox, “an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior,” to a conference near Lake Tahoe and let him talk about “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” Little did the audience know [...]
≡ Category: Film, Psychology | ≅ 3 Comments
Just when you thought that Freudian theory was dead, it makes a comeback, thanks to Slavoj Žižek, our favorite Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist. Above, Žižek offers a reading that finds Freud’s model of the psyche at work in the Marx Brothers. Hyper Groucho is the super-ego; rational Chico, the ego; and mute Harpo, the id. [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Psychology, Sci Fi | ≅ 2 Comments
Ray Bradbury, one of America’s beloved sci-fi writers, turns 91 today. So how about a little party favor: This retro clip takes you back to the 1970s (we believe) and it features Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451, literature has more than [...]
≡ Category: Film, Psychology | ≅ 11 Comments
According this fascinating piece in The Smithsonian, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 weepfest The Champ is the most consistently effective tearjerker in the history of film. It’s also the tearjerker most often used in scientific studies of grief and sadness: The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people [...]
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