Research & Rescue Holding Pen

How Our Brains Make Memories

Surprising new research about the act of remembering may help people with post-traumatic stress disorder By Greg MillerPhotographs by Gilles MingassonSmithsonian magazine, May 2010

via www.smithsonianmag.com

"Stuff": The psychology of hoarding - Nonfiction - Salon.com

America's most notorious case of hoarding came to light on March 21, 1947, when New York City police were called to investigate a dead body in a three-story Harlem brownstone. The building belonged to two elderly brothers, Langley and Homer Collyer, and when the cops made it into the building, they were shocked by what they saw: piles of junk -- including 14 pianos, a Model T Ford and the remains of a two-headed fetus -- that reached to the ceiling, and a system of tunnels in which Homer and Langley were found dead, one crushed to death by a pile of things, the other dead of starvation.

via www.salon.com

Let's Invent a New Word or Phrase: What do you call someone who "opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome." - Bob Sutton

Let's Invent a New Word or Phrase: What do you call someone who "opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome." - Bob Sutton

Secret to Happiness, Solved: Go to College, Move West - The Atlantic Business Channel

Human Capital [measured as share of the population with a B.A. and above]: Happiness at the city or metro-level is more closely associated with human capital with a correlation of .68 - the strongest correlation of any of the variables we looked at. The scatter-graph below shows a fairly linear relationship.

via business.theatlantic.com

Human friendships max at 150 - Holy Kaw!

It doesn’t matter how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers you have—the human brain is only capable of managing up to 150 relationships, says research from Oxford University. The theory—“Dunbar’s number,” as they call it, for its founder Robin Dunbar—first surfaced in the 1990s when Dunbar examined a variety of societies and found humans could manage no more relationships, regardless of extroversion. Now the evolutionary anthropology professor is looking to see if social networking sites, like Facebook, increase the human capacity for friendships. Initial observations suggest not.

via holykaw.alltop.com

How the Different Voices in Your Head Affect What You Eat, Drink, Wear, Drive, and Buy - It's Your Money - TIME.com

How the Different Voices in Your Head Affect What You Eat, Drink, Wear, Drive, and Buy

Posted by Brad Tuttle Friday, January 15, 2010 at 9:47 am

1 Comment • Trackback (1) • Related Topics: cars, clothes, food, q&a, smart shopping, "Talking to Ourselves", brownies, cigarettes, consumer, donuts, Doritos, George Milne, Shalini Bahl

A new study tries to explain the complicated reasons for how people make decisions to consume everything from Doritos to hybrid cars, Victoria's Secret lingerie to New Balance sneakers.

In their paper  "Talking to Ourselves: A Dialogical Exploration of Consumption Experiences", published by the  Journal of Consumer Research, Shalini Bahl and George R. Milne describe how each person has different "selves," which are basically the different parts of your personality—you know, the voices in your brain telling you what to do or not do. These selves are often at odds with each other, and so when one self gets its way by say, smoking a cigarette or scarfing down a third brownie, the other more responsible and prudent selves may be angry or disappointe

via money.blogs.time.com

Fleshmap: Studies of Desire: About the Project

Fleshmap   Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.

Touch investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones. We asked hundreds of people to rank how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover in different points of the body. The resulting images reveal a map of sensual desire with multiple focal points and islands of excitement. Read more about our method.

While Touch examines collective patterns, Look explores individuality and the hidden surprises that each body reveals when bared. Through a process of abstraction, the piece reveals the multiplicity of formal possibilities contained in a single body part. Contours from different individuals are presented in collections that expose both familiar and oft-overlooked patterns, confronting prototypical notions of ourselves. Read more about our method.

Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body. Verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry, and religion are distilled to their basic elements. In a play with language, the "body rebus" emerges as a visual representation of cultural expressions of the physical in us. Read more about our method.

 

Fleshmap is a production of
HINT.FM

Artists   Fleshmap is a series of artistic studies created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. The two artists are known for their pioneering work in data visualization, which has been exhibited in venues such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Fleshmap is an independent art project, not affiliated with any company or institution.

 

Credits   Data: The data for the "touch" project, which maps regions of pleasure and desire on the human body, was collected with the help of Dolores Labs. (Read more about the method here.) We're especially grateful to

via www.fleshmap.com