According to this third view, the world is of long duration and is forever changing; it is evolving. Even though this may seem strange to us moderns, the concept of evolution was at first alien to Western thought. The power of the Christian fundamentalist dogma was so strong that it required a long series of developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the idea of evolution became fully acceptable. As far as science is concerned, the acceptance of evolution meant that the world could no longer be considered merely as the seat of activity of physical laws but had to incorporate history and, more importantly, the observed changes in the living world in the course of time. Gradually the term “evolution” came to represent these changes.

If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true – that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.

The older you grow, the less your family background predicts your IQ and the better your genes predict it. An orphan of brilliant parents adopted into a family of dullards might do poorly at school but by middle age could end up a brilliant professor of quantum mechanics. An orphan of dullard parents, reared in a family of Nobel Prize-winners, might do well at school but by middle age may be working in a job that requires little reading or little deep thought.
Numerically, the contribution of “shared environment” to variation in IQ in a western society is roughly 40 percent in people younger than 20. It then falls rapidly to zero in older age groups. Conversely, the contribution of genes to explaining variation in IQ rises from 20 percent in infancy to 40 percent in childhood to 60 percent in adults and maybe 80 percent in people past middle age.

• 死体は存在するが、死は存在しないのである。死などというものは、言葉としてしか存在したことはない。言葉ではない死というものを、見た人も、知っている人も、いないのである。すなわち、この世の誰ひとりとしてそれを「わからない」のである。
• 普通には人は、死が存在すると信じて生きている。そして死を恐れる、「無になる」と。しかし無が存在したのならそれは無ではないのだから死は存在しない。したがって恐れる理由はない。
• 自分が存在しなければ、世界は存在しないんだ。自分が存在するということが、世界が存在するということなんだ。
• 世のすべては人々が作り出しているもの、その意味では、すべては幻想と言っていい。
• 善悪を判断する基準は、自分にある、自分にしかないんだ。
• 人間が人間を無条件で愛するというのは、ものすごく難しい。
• 宇宙の全体はビッグバンによって始まったということになっている。でも、だとすると、ビッグバンの前には何があったのだろう。
• 物質があることの確実さは、実は不確実なことなんだ。でもそれを不確実であると考えている自分がある。こちらは絶対確実だ。
• 本当は「今」しかないのだ。どんな古い星も銀河もも、それを見ていると考えている今のこの自分より確実なものではない。
• 自由とは、精神に捉われがないということだ。
• 死の怖れにも捉われず、いかなる価値観にも捉われず、捉われないということにも捉われない。
• 何でもいい、何をしてもいい、何がどうあってもいいと知っている、これは絶対的な自由の境地だ。

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Vision: About one quarter of the human brain is involved in visual processing – more than any other sense. Arguably the most closely studied of the five main senses, the Society for Neuroscience claims that more is known about vision than any other vertebrate sensory system.
Hearing: Commonly listed alongside vision as one of the most important of the human senses, hearing is is a vital part of everything from communication to risk-avoidance.
Taste & Smell: These two senses rely on different sensory organs, but are very closely related; when someone loses his or her sense of smell, for example, their sense of taste is dramatically diminished.
Touch: The sense of touch is remarkably complex, and involves the detection of everything from pressure, to itchiness, to temperature. Most of these sensations and their mechanisms remain poorly understood, but are thought to involve a range of nerves in the skin capable of responding to various forms of stimuli. So-called “Merkel disk receptors,” for example, are involved in the perception of pressure; while “Rufini corpuscles” are believed to detect the sensation we associate with stretching.

It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit … In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. … For there is not a single human being … who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements …

本当の自分はどこにあるのか？
 
「現代病」と呼ぶには、あまりにも古い病です。《自分探し》という人類の文明とともに流行りだしたこの病気には、誰しも一度はかからねばならないと思います。赤ちゃんが必ず一度かかる「知恵熱」ではありませんが、大人になるためには《自分探し》の時期が必要です。しかし《自分探し》はあくまでも病気であるということを忘れないでください。《自分探し》の解決は、探していた《自分》をようやく手に入れたときに訪れるのではありません。そんな《自分》というものは、最初からないのですから。

Since the first fall in of armies and soldiers, the issue of what to do with their sexual desires has been addressed. In ancient times there were camp followers, a significant number of whom were prostitutes. Soldiers would patronize the services of these women whenever there was a respite from combat, and I have to guess sometimes when combat was eminent.
The formula has never changed:
    ･ Young men;
    ･ Forced abstinence or absence of normal sexual satisfaction;
    ･ Lots of time available during the lull in combat;
    ･ Invading or occupying force with sufficient money to pay for sexual favors.
This combination has resulted in armies either accepting the existence of prostitution or at least looking the other way when it was happening. In some cases the alternatives were much less desirable, homosexuality or rape.

The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors.
The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension.
The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality.
The ego operates based on the reality principle, which strives to satisfy the id’s desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses.
The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society–our sense of right and wrong.
The superego acts to perfect and civilize our behavior.
The superego is present in the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved.

We believe that all the good things that drive us are intrinsic to our character. Other people? Not so much. We work hard because we are dedicated, while they just want higher pay. Our excellence in all our pursuits springs from the fact that we have a finer soul. Other people just happened to come to the same conclusion because they were pushed by circumstance. No wonder we’re better than average.
We know, absolutely know, that the people around us have their little illusions about their skill and their intrinsic qualities, but we don’t see ourselves as having the same biases. We can’t admit that we’re careless, or lazy, or hateful. We don’t really think that the only reason that we gave to charity or picked up “The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott” was that cute librarian was watching. We just know that that’s what other people do and we know it because our minds are so superior.

Are we mad to have let a maverick scientist create a virus that could wipe out 400 million people?

• Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka created a new strain of 2009 swine flu virus
• If virus escaped it could kill up to a billion people – there is no known vaccine
• Professor Kawaoka argues that it is part of valuable scientific research
• Others in the field have called the experiment ‘exceedingly dangerous’

• He’s basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to vaccination. Everything he did before was dangerous, but this is even madder.
• I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make “transmissible” novel viruses willy-nilly.
• In the case of influenza, we anticipate that such a risk assessment will show that the risks are unjustifiable.

メッシは、走らない。サッカーのワールドカップで、アルゼンチンを決勝進出に導いたエースがきのうまでの六試合で走った距離は、計五一・九キロだそうだ。
今大会でこれまでに一番走ったオランダのスナイダーは六九・六キロ。ドイツのノイアーがゴールキーパーながら三一・五キロも走ったのに比べれば、いかにも見劣りする。特に守りの時、その走りは極端に落ちる。「めっし」とパソコンで打てば、まず「滅私」と変換されるが、滅私奉公には程遠い働きではないか。
ここ一番では驚異的な働きをする天才には失礼ながら、そのプレーぶりをテレビ観戦しつつ思い出したのは、進化生物学を研究する長谷川英祐さんの著書『働かないアリに意義がある』だ。
みなが目を三角にして働いていそうなアリの社会でも、やたらと腰が重いアリが相当数いる。二割のアリはほとんど働かぬという。全員が一斉かつ懸命に働く方が効率的に思えるが、そうではないらしい。
いざ不測の危機に襲われた時や、運びきれぬほどの食料が見つかるような好機が到来した時こそ、腰の重さゆえに体力を温存したアリの出番となる。非効率に見える「働かぬアリ」がいる巣の方が長く残るというから、虫の世界は奥深い。

「こころや意識というものは脳の中にあり、脳がはたらくことによって生み出されている」ということについては、ほとんどの脳科学者は疑っていません。私もそのうちのひとりですから、自分とはこころのことであり、それを生み出しているのは脳である、という仮定を支持しているということになります。
神経科学的にいうと、脳にある多数の神経細胞の集団的活動の一部が、こころとして自分に感じられているものの正体です。
30億個の文字列＝ゲノムは、私たちのからだをデザインしている設計図です。先に、「自分とはこころのことであり、それを生み出しているのは脳である」といいました。脳もからだの一部ですから、このからだの設計図であるゲノムには、脳の作り方のすべてが書かれているはずです。
ゲノムに脳の作り方のすべてが書いてあるということは、そこには脳が生み出すこころについての秘密も隠されているはず。こころを生み出す脳、その脳の設計図が30億個の文字列で書かれており、その配列は基本的に一生変わらないのです。つまり、ゲノムこそ、一刻たりとも同じ状態にとどまることなく変化し続ける自分と自分のこころの背景にあって、一生変わることなく、自分を自分たらしめているものの実体なのではないでしょうか。

We asked a group of musically naı¨ve participants to perform a pitch comparison task, a different group of musically naı¨ve participants and a group of musicians to perform a musical instrument identification task on sounds having different pitch. A SMARC effect (i.e. high-frequency pitches favouring up responses and low-frequencies pitches favouring down responses) was present both when pitch was task relevant, and when it was task irrelevant. Moreover, when pitch height was task irrelevant, a horizontal mapping of pitches appeared for musicians only.
In conclusion, we found that a representational dimension (pitch height) influences performance with vertically aligned responses irrespective of its relevance to the task. This suggests that our cognitive system maps pitch onto a mental representation of space. Our results are thus consistent with studies pointing to the integral nature of spatial and spectral processing of auditory stimuli.

In a preliminary study, passersby in a large shopping mall were significantly more likely to help a same-sex accomplice (by retrieving a dropped pen or providing change for a doUar) when these helping opportunities took place in the presence of pleasant ambient odors (e.g., baking cookies, roasting coffee) than in the absence of such odors. Participants also reported significantly higher levels of positive affect in the presence of pleasant odors. In a second study, the order in which passersby were exposed to a helping opportunity and rated their current mood was systematically varied. &sults similar to those of the first study were obtained; order of task had no effect on either mood or helping, but helping was significantly greater in the presence of pleasant fragrances than in their absence. In addition, there was some evidence that fragrance-induced increments in helping were mediated by increments in positive affect.

The idea that qualities acquired from experience can be transmitted to future offspring has long been considered incompatible with current understanding of genetics. However, the recent documentation of non-Mendelian transgenerational inheritance makes such a “Lamarckian”-like phenomenon more plausible. Here, we demonstrate that exposure of 15-d-old mice to 2 weeks of an enriched environment (EE), that includes exposure to novel objects, elevated social interactions and voluntary exercise, enhances long-term potentiation (LTP) not only in these enriched mice but also in their future offspring through early adolescence, even if the offspring never experience EE. In both generations, LTP induction is augmented by a newly appearing cAMP/p38 MAP kinase-dependent signaling cascade. Strikingly, defective LTP and contextual fear conditioning memory normally associated with ras-grf knock-out mice are both masked in the offspring of enriched mutant parents. The transgenerational transmission of this effect occurs from the enriched mother to her offspring during embryogenesis. If a similar phenomenon occurs in humans, the effectiveness of one’s memory during adolescence, particularly in those with defective cell signaling mechanisms that control memory, can be influenced by environmental stimulation experienced by one’s mother during her youth.

When rewards did not depend on their answers, blue and red were about equally popular colors, the most popular numbers were 7, 2 and 10, and only 6.8 % named the current year. However, when the game was turned into a pure coordination game, by rewarding those who matched the choices of others, red became by far the most frequent color, 1 the most frequent number, and 61.1 % named the current year. Red, 1 and the current year had become “focal points”, objects with “symbolic or connotative characteristics that transcend the mathematical structure of the game”. Automatic (fast, effortless) recognition of salient characteristics of complex high-dimensional objects is typical of intuitive judgments. Focal points must have properties that each participant recognizes as being salient not only to herself but also to others, but this too may be at least partly an intuitive judgment, using salience to one’s self as an input. In general, intuition and deliberative reasoning are mental processes with very different properties. Intuition is fast, automatic, emotional and effortless. Reasoning is slow, rule-governed, controlled and effortful.

ひらめきは思いついた後に、その答えの理由が言える。「先ほどまでは気づかなかったが、今はこの答えの理由がよく分かる。なぜならば…かくかくしかじか…」といった具合に、その理由が本人に明示的に分かる。これがひらめきだ。
直感は本人にも理由が分からない確信を指す。思い至ったまではよいが、「ただ何となく」としか言いようがない曖昧な感覚である。根拠は明確ではないが、その答えの正しさが漠然と確信できるのが直感である。そして重要なことは、直感は意外と正しいという点だ。この点が単なる「ヤマ勘」や「でたらめ」とは決定的に異なる。

The study of human learning is complicated by the myriad of processing elements involved in conducting any behavioral task. In the case of visual perceptual learning, there has been significant controversy regarding the task processes that guide the formation of this learning. However, there is a developing consensus that top-down, task-related factors are required for such learning to take place. Here we challenge this idea by use of a novel procedure in which human participants, who were deprived of food and water, passively viewed visual stimuli while receiving occasional drops of water as rewards. Visual orientation stimuli, which were temporally paired with the liquid rewards, were viewed monocularly and rendered imperceptible by continuously flashing contour-rich patterns to the other eye. Results show that visual learning can be formed in human adults through stimulus-reward pairing in the absence of a task and without awareness of the stimulus presentation or reward contingencies.

Social psychologists have discovered an adaptive unconscious that allows people to size up the world extremely quickly, make decisions, and set goals—all while their conscious minds are otherwise occupied. The human mind operates largely out of view of its owners, possibly because that’s the way it evolved to work initially, and because that’s the way it works best, under many circumstances. Without such an efficient, powerful, and fast means of understanding and acting on the world, it would be difficult to survive.
… Curiously, people seem to be unaware of their own unawareness, rarely answering “I don’t know” when asked to explain their decisions. People freely give reasons for their preferences, even when it is clear that these reasons are confabulations and not accurate reports.
… Why are people so unaware of their unawareness? One reason may be because we do have access to a good deal of information that is immediate, compelling, and privileged. The fact that we experience a rich mental life makes it hard to recognize that the vast majority of our mental processes are not directly observable.

Parietal and premotor cortex regions are serious contenders for bringing motor intentions and motor responses into awareness. We used electrical stimulation in seven patients undergoing awake brain surgery. Stimulating the right inferior parietal regions triggered a strong intention and desire to move the contralateral hand, arm, or foot, whereas stimulating the left inferior parietal region provoked the intention to move the lips and to talk. When stimulation intensity was increased in parietal areas, participants believed they had really performed these movements, although no electromyographic activity was detected. Stimulation of the premotor region triggered overt mouth and contralateral limb movements. Yet, patients firmly denied that they had moved. Conscious intention and motor awareness thus arise from increased parietal activity before movement execution.

It is widely believed, at least in scientific circles, that living systems, including mankind, obey the natural physical laws. However, it is also commonly accepted that man has the capacity to make “free” conscious decisions that do not simply reflect the chemical makeup of the individual at the time of decision—this chemical makeup reflecting both the genetic and environmental history and a degree of stochasticism. Whereas philosophers have discussed for centuries the apparent lack of a causal component for free will, many biologists still seem to be remarkably at ease with this notion of free will; and furthermore, our judicial system is based on such a belief. It is the author’s contention that a belief in free will is nothing other than a continuing belief in vitalism—something biologists proudly believe they discarded well over 100 years ago.

A range of applications, from predicting the spread of human and electronic viruses to city planning and resource management in mobile communications, depend on our ability to foresee the whereabouts and mobility of individuals, raising a fundamental question: To what degree is human behavior predictable? Here we explore the limits of predictability in human dynamics by studying the mobility patterns of anonymized mobile phone users. By measuring the entropy of each individual’s trajectory, we find a 93% potential predictability in user mobility across the whole user base. Despite the significant differences in the travel patterns, we find a remarkable lack of variability in predictability, which is largely independent of the distance users cover on a regular basis.
･･･ despite our deep-rooted desire for change and spontaneity, our daily mobility is, in fact, characterized by a deep-rooted regularity.

A mind is the set of cognitive faculties that enables consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory—a characteristic of humans, but which also may apply to other life forms.
Whatever its relation to the physical body it is generally agreed that mind is that which enables a being to have subjective awareness and intentionality towards their environment, to perceive and respond to stimuli with some kind of agency, and to have consciousness, including thinking and feeling.

L’esprit est constitué par l’ensemble des facultés intellectuelles. Dans de nombreuses traditions religieuses, il s’agit d’un principe de la vie incorporelle de l’être humain. En philosophie, la notion d’esprit est au cœur des traditions dites spiritualistes. On oppose en ce sens corps et esprit (nommé plus volontiers conscience par la philosophie et âme par certaines religions). En psychologie contemporaine, le terme devient synonyme de l’ensemble des activités mentales humaines, conscientes et non-conscientes.

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.

Qu’est-ce que la tolérance ? C’est l’apanage de l’humanité. Nous sommes tous pétris de faiblesses et d’erreurs ; pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises, c’est la première loi de la nature.

選考の過程では自分たちのことばかりではなく、対戦相手の分析も入念にやるつもりです。相手に対してどういうチャンスをつくれるのか、どういうことでこちらがピンチになるのか、あらゆることを想定しながら、どんな困難な状況に陥っても乗り越えられるメンバーを、これまでの貢献度と現時点でのパフォーマンスも吟味しながら、すべてを踏まえて最終決断を下すつもりです。大げさではなく、私の決断が選手たちのサッカー人生を左右することになります。選んだ瞬間に選ばれなかった選手が生まれてしまう。失格の烙印を押された気持ちになる選手もいるでしょう。決してそうではありません。これだけは決める前からハッキリしています。日本にはワールドカップ出場に値する選手が２３人以上、確実にいます。できることなら皆、連れていきたい。しかし、それはできない。決断する作業は嫌いではありません。決断すべき重要な局面に立たされることを幸せに思うタイプの人間でもあります。そんな私でも、心の中に重苦しい感情が少しずつ澱のようにたまり始めています。

人間の存在意義は、その利用価値や有用性によるものではない。野に咲く花のように、ただ「無償に」存在しているひとも、大きな立場からみたら存在理由があるにちがいない。自分の眼に自分の存在の意味が感じられないひと、他人の眼にもみとめられないようなひとでも、私たちと同じ生をうけた同胞なのである。もし彼らの存在意義が問題になるなら、まず自分の、そして人類全体の存在意義が問われなくてはならない。そもそも宇宙のなかで、人類の存在とはそれほど重大なものであろうか。人類を万物の中心と考え、生物のなかでの「霊長」と考えることからしてすでにこっけいな思いあがりではなかろうか。
現に私たちも自分の存在意義の根拠を自分の内にはみいだしえず、「他者」のなかにのみみいだしたものではなかったか。五体満足の私たちと病みおとろえた者との間に、どれだけのちがいがあるというのだろう。私たちもやがて間もなく病みおとろえて行くのではなかったか。現在げんきで精神の世界に生きていると自負するひとも、もとをただせばやはり「単なる生命の一単位」にすぎなかったのであり、生命に育まれ、支えられて来たからこそ精神的な存在でもありえたのである。また現在もなお、生命の支えなくしては、一瞬たりとも精神的存在でありえないはずである。このことは生きがい喪失の深淵にさまよったことのあるひとならば、身にしみて知っているはずだ――。

人間にはきれい好きな人とそうでもない人がいて、部屋がどのくらい散らかると掃除を始めるかは、個人によって異なります。きれい好きな人は汚れに対する反応閾値が低く、散らかっていても平気な人は高いというわけです。
これがアリの社会では、必要な仕事が現れると、反応閾値の最も低い一部のアリがまずは取り掛かり、別の仕事が現れたらその次に閾値の低いアリが・・・と、低い順に作業を行う。つまり、個体間の反応閾値の差異によって、必要に応じた労働力がうまく分配されているのです。
皆が一斉に働くシステムだと、同じくらい働いて同時に全員が疲れてしまい、誰も働けなくなる時間が生じてしまいます。
働いていたアリが疲れてしまったときに、それまで働いていなかったアリが働き始めることで、労働の停滞を防ぐ。つまり、働かないアリがいるシステムの方が、コロニーの長期的な存続が可能になるということです。働かないアリは、怠けてコロニーの効率を下げる存在ではなく、むしろそれらがいないとコロニーの存続が危ぶまれる、極めて貴重な存在だと言えます。
われわれの社会においてもムダを省くばかりではなく、ムダを楽しめる余力のようなものが必要なのかもしれません。

Social comparison processes include the desire to affiliate with others, the desire for information about others, and explicit self-evaluation against others. Previously these types of comparison activity and their corresponding measures have been treated as interchangeable. We present evidence that in certain groups under threat, these comparison activities diverge, with explicit self-evaluation made against a less fortunate target (downward evaluation), but information and affiliation sought out from more fortunate others (upward contacts). These effects occur because downward evaluation and upward contacts appear to serve different needs, the former ameliorating self-esteem and the latter enabling a person to improve his or her situation and simultaneously increase motivation and hope.
Downward “comparisons” (or explicit self-evaluations) may meet emotional needs by making people feel fortunate in comparison with others and by raising self-esteem. Upward contacts may serve problem-solving needs by providing role models on whom one can pattern one’s own behavior and meet certain emotional needs by providing hope and inspiration. These two patterns (upward contacts and downward evaluations) may exist simultaneously in the same people without engendering any contradictions, in as much as affiliations are social contacts and downward evaluations can be cognitive constructions.

人均每年假期115天，你休够了吗？
人均存款77623元（也有说法为32719元），你存多了还是少了？

面对这些调查报告、统计数据……总数、平均数、百分数，数数皆热点，人们总是乐此不疲地对号入座，看看自己处在什么位置。那么，从心理学角度上看，这些统计数据有什么意义呢？
从自我意识萌发的那一刻起，人类就没有停止过对自我的思考和探索，但是人类很难直接获得有关自我的信息。由于群居的生活特点决定了人的社会属性，所以人们往往通过与周围人的比较来定义自己在现实生活中的处境、地位等社会特征，如能力特点、智力水平、观点的倾向性、身体健康状况等等，在比较性的社会环境中获得意义感。美国社会学家Festinger把这种现象命名为“社会比较”（social comparison），这是人类在相互作用过程中不可避免会产生、并且普遍存在的一种社会心理现象。
社会比较的过程和信息对人类具有基本的进化价值，会影响到人们的自我概念、情绪状态和对未来的期望。
从比较的方向上看，与更优秀的人作比较，称为“上行比较”（upward social comparison）；反之，与不如自己的人相比，称为“下行比较”（downward social comparison）。

(How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.)
Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers.
These behaviors occur despite modest, equivalent levels of self-reported identification with heroic and villainous avatars, alike. People are prone to be unaware of the influence of their virtual representations on their behavioral responses.
In virtual environments, people can freely choose avatars that allow them to opt into or opt out of a certain entity, group, or situation. Consumers and practitioners should remember that powerful imitative effects can occur when people put on virtual masks.

Many, many theorists assume that because it takes a lot of energy for brain processing, that the brain is only going to spend time processing what you’re ultimately going to perceive. But in fact the brain is deciding what you’re going to perceive, and it’s processing all of the information and then it’s determining what’s the best interpretation.

Neural map of a typical woman‘s brain

Neural map of a typical man‘s brain

Sex differences are of high scientific and societal interest because of their prominence in behavior of humans and nonhuman species. This work is highly significant because it studies a very large population of 949 youths (8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) using the diffusion-based structural connectome of the brain, identifying novel sex differences. The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

New York City is the perfect example of diversity functioning well. It’s an exciting place that produces lots of innovation and creativity. It’s not a coincidence that New York has so much energy and also so much diversity.
People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call “tools.” The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.
The problems we face in the world are very complicated. Any one of us can get stuck. If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.
But if we have people with diverse tools, they’ll get stuck in different places. One person can do their best, and then someone else can come in and improve on it. There’s a lot of empirical data to show that diverse cities are more productive, diverse boards of directors make better decisions, the most innovative companies are diverse.
Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research.

Mannix and Neale present three suggestions for group formation.

1. Diverse groups are appropriate for tasks involving innovation and creativity, while homogeneous groups are better for exploitation and implementation of existing knowledge.
2. Careful attention needs to be paid to control process problems in diverse groups, more so than in homogeneous groups.
3. Efforts need to be made by group mediators to ensure that minority voices are heard, ensuring that group stereotyping and muffling are suppressed.

はるか太古の地球には、細菌のように小さくて作りが単純な生き物しかいなかった。それが今では、数千万種ともいわれる多種多様な生き物が暮らしている。だが、生物は常に繁栄の連続だったわけではない。生命の誕生以来、5回の「大量絶滅」を経験してきた。その最大のものは、古生代の末期に起きた大量絶滅で、なんと90％以上の生物の種が絶滅したといわれている。古生代の海で大繁栄した三葉虫もその犠牲になった。恐竜を絶滅させた中生代末期の大量絶滅はそれよりも小規模で、70％程度の絶滅だったらしい。巨大隕石の衝突による地球環境の激変がその原因であるとされている。
そして現在は、第6の大量絶滅の時代といわれている。これは、他ならぬ私たち人間の種々の営みが原因である。こうした「生物多様性の危機」を、自然の摂理とみなして放置するのか、それとも人間の英知を集めて回避するのか、それはすべて私たちの生き方にかかっているし、生き方自体にも影響するに違いない。

今思うに、子はいつも、人間のことばかりお考えになっておられました。人間の倖せについて、不幸について、そして人間が、特にこの乱世に生まれ合わせた人間が少しでも倖せになるには、どうすればいいか。人間が不幸になるのを防ぐには、どうすればいいか。いつでも、子はこの地球上に生まれて来た人間というものについて、その倖せな生き方、生き甲斐ある生き方について考えておられました。人間、この世に生まれてきたからには、いかなる時代であろうと、倖せになる権利がある。そのようなお考えが、あらゆる子のお考えの根元に座っていたか、と思います。

『仁』とはすべての人間が倖せに生きてゆくための、人間の人間に対する考え方であります。「まこと」、「まごころ」、「人の道」、・・・・いろいろ、どのようにも名づけられましょうが、要するに、人間はお互いに相手をいたわる優しい心を持ち、そしてお互いに援けあって、この生きにくい乱れに乱れた世を、やはりこの世に生まれてきてよかった、と思うように生きようではないか。そういう考えが『仁』であります。

If communism failed the people, capitalism has failed the planet.
Privately owned corporations big and small are committed to one simple obsession: maximising returns to their shareholders. They pursue this by growing revenues, cutting costs, and playing the system. There is no reward or incentive to voluntary raise their cost base – for example, to account for the indirect costs of damage to the environment as a result of their activities – for the sake of the public good (unless customers reward them for it). That is where governments (are supposed to) step in. While businesses play their end of the game commendably well, the public sector has been woefully ineffective in its role as guardian of the environment. And is there a greater public good?
Economic growth raises all boats, is the elixir to all social ills, and must be pursued at all costs. The maxim that economic growth must be the guiding national priority is held by world leaders of every industrialised country and most all learned men of the dismal science, as we roast through Saharan summers and freeze through Arctic winters. Lower the unemployment rate? Grow the economy. Balance the budget? Grow the economy. Get re-elected? Grow the economy.
From the perspective of a flu-ridden planet swinging from sweats to chills, capitalism and the free market economy is badly in need of overhaul. It is creating immense wealth for a shrinking affluent class, but doing little to address the looming climate disaster.

匂いは情動と深く結び付いていると考えられています。例えば、腐った魚の匂いを嗅げば、強烈な嫌悪感が込み上げ、思わず顔をそむけてしまうという人が多いのでしょう。また、ある種類の匂いを嗅ぐことで昔の記憶がよみがえって懐かしい思いをした人がいるかもしれません。多くの人にとって匂いと情動や行動との関係は日常的に経験することのできる身近なものではないでしょうか。しかし、私たちヒトを含む哺乳類の脳が、特定の匂い分子を感知した際に、それに対応した情動や行動を引き起こすメカニズムが解明されているのかとなると、まだまだ研究の手が届いていない問題が多いという状況でした。私たちが作成した、匂い情報を伝達する神経細胞の一部を、遺伝子操作の技術を応用して特異的に遮断したミュータントマウス(神経回路の改変マウス)は、天敵の発する匂い分子そのものを感じることができるのに、その匂いを危険であると判断して恐怖を感じることができないという驚くべき行動を示しました。野生型マウスは猫の付けていた首輪ですらその匂いを恐がって近づかないのに、このミュータントマウスは恐れるそぶりも見せずに猫そのものに近づいてしまいました。このマウスは私たちに、猫の匂いが恐いのは遺伝子が先天的に決めていることを教えてくれたのです。私たちは「神経回路の改変マウス」を駆使して、哺乳類の脳が外界の匂い情報の意味や価値を判断して特異的な情動や行動を引き起こすメカニズムを解明する研究を進めています。

Mars One will establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Crews of four will depart every two years, starting in 2024. Our first unmanned mission will be launched in 2018.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

These are the central questions that the great philosopher David Hume said are of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together, what is man’s ultimate nature?
We keep returning to the subject with a sense of hesitancy and even dread. For if the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect—we are biological and our souls cannot fly free. If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. Deity can still be sought in the origin of the ultimate units of matter, in quarks and electron shells but not in the origin of species. However much we embellish that stark conclusion with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the last century of scientific research. No way appears around this admittedly unappealing proposition. It is the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the human condition. Without it the humanities and social sciences are the limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra. With it, human nature can be laid open as an object of fully empirical research, biology can be put to the service of liberal education, and our self-conception can be enormously and truthfully enriched.

The Cognitive Science Society, Inc. brings together researchers from many fields who hold a common goal:

understanding the nature of the human mind.

The Society promotes scientific interchange among researchers in disciplines comprising the field of Cognitive Science, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

There are a lot of chemicals racing around your brain and body when you’re in love. Researchers are gradually learning more and more about the roles they play both when we are falling in love and when we’re in long-term relationships. Of course, estrogen and testosterone play a role in the sex drive area. Without them, we might never venture into the "real love" arena.
That initial giddiness that comes when we’re first falling in love includes a racing heart, flushed skin and sweaty palms. Researchers say this is due to the dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine we’re releasing. Dopamine is thought to be the "pleasure chemical," producing a feeling of bliss. Norepinephrine is similar to adrenaline and produces the racing heart and excitement. Together these two chemicals produce elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite and focused attention. The human body releases the cocktail of love rapture only when certain conditions are met and … men more readily produce it than women, because of their more visual nature.
Another possible explanation for the intense focus and idealizing view that occurs in the attraction stage. People in love have lower levels of serotonin and also that neural circuits associated with the way we assess others are suppressed. These lower serotonin levels are the same as those found in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, possibly explaining why those in love "obsess" about their partner.

Pleasures are more than simple reflexive reactions to desirable things. We saw this principle with food, and the same applies to sex. The context in which we encounter objects makes a big difference in our subjective experiences. For example, pain can topple into pleasure. Women have higher thresholds for pain when sexually aroused. These thresholds increase on average by 40% with vaginal stimulation and by 100% near and during orgasm. Despite these changes in what counts as pain, the sensation itself is not dulled and is no less arousing. Rather, the same intense sensation is not experienced as pain. In the brain, the insula and anterior cingulate are active during arousal. These same areas are active when people feel pain. Curiously, people’s faces take on similar contortions when experiencing intense pain as when experiencing orgasms. Here the sensations producing pain are still experienced, but they are not unpleasant.

I am walking across the world. I set out on foot from Herto Bouri, an early site of Homo sapiens fossils in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia, to retrace the pathways of the first anatomically modern humans who colonized the planet at least 60,000 years ago.
At the walk’s start in the Horn of Africa, one of the last habitable places on earth where automobiles remain scarce, walking was a near-universal activity.
But once I crossed the Red Sea on a camel boat to the Middle East, where car ownership explodes to 300 or more vehicles per 1,000 citizens, I’d entered a region subjugated utterly by the vulcanized rubber tire.
It can be lonely out here among the Car Brains. Sometimes, out walking, I feel like a ghost. Already, I have to seek out society’s marginal people to find my way across the planet. Settled nomads. The ambulatory poor. The very ancient, whose mode of transport is still a donkey or maybe a cart, elders who haven’t forgotten about earned distances. They point to referents beyond the aphasia of paved roads. I take my compass bearings off their paupers’ hands.

嗜みとか慎みとかが大切であることは否定しないが、それは、体中で笑い怒れる人が慎むから慎みであり、嗜みなのであって、エヘヘヘヘと誤摩化し笑いしかできないようでは、腰が抜けているというだけであります。自然の感情の発露がなくなってしまうようでは、人間が人形に近づいたといえます。もう一度、原始の状態にフィードバックし、そこから再出発する方が、活き活きした生き方が生まれるのではなかろうか。自分の持っている力を発揮できなくなった人間には、特にこういう、全身を叩きつけ、全力で生きることが必要だと私は思うのであります。

人類の青年時代は、もはや過去のものになりつつある。人間が人間を滅ぼし得る力を、自然の中から自らの力でつかみとってしまった現段階は、自然と人間の関わりをさらにまた大きく変化させたといわざるをえない。人類はいまや壮年時代に入ったといわなくてはならないと思うのです。それならそれなりの勇気と智慧を持って、これからの社会の問題を考えていく必要があると思います。
その時に、人間にはどうしようもない力を、聖なるものととらえていた古代人のあり方からも学ばなくてはならない。人間は自然を新しく知り、その力を開発していく。これは人間の本質ですが、同時に有限の存在である人間が、自然のすべてを知りつくすことができないということもまた、一方の現実であります。そういう人間の力を超えた自然の力について、われわれが認識を深めることと、宗教の問題は深い関わりがあると思います。人間の前進は引き返すことはできない。しかし前に進んで行く時に、これまで人間が何を切り捨ててきたか、前進の中で何を見失ってきたかを絶えず注意深く見つめながら、先へ進んでいかなくてはいけないと思うのです。

As humans, we are in general a social species, programmed to support each other in family units and communities and it seems often mob rule dictates what is normal, expected or acceptable behaviour. Especially in a modern society where the media projects these ideas into every facet of our lives, we are now educated very early on as to how life apparently is. No matter what our true feelings inside, we may now attempt to adhere to the ‘rules’ that we have collectively set ourselves. Individuality can be sacrificed to a greater or lesser degree in order to fit in with the consensus ideal and prevent rejection, or else the pursuit of self-awareness if obscured or avoided in favour of what ‘should be’.

Sexual orientations are typically thought of as being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Recently, however, some researchers have proposed that asexuality is potentially another sexual orientation. Asexuals are people who are not sexually attracted to other people.
Researchers who have studied human asexuality have focused on different definitions, such as a lack of sexual orientation, lack of sexual behavior, and lack of sexual desire or excitement.
Some researchers have suggested that asexuality may simply be an extreme case of low sexual desire disorder. However, asexuals oppose this idea. They do not want a cure for their lack of sexual attraction and are not distressed by it. Many resist the idea that asexuality should be labeled as a disorder at all. They argue that asexuality is better classified as a sexual orientation.

Parents evolved to invest more resources in daughters who chose mates with few resources. This unequal investment was in the parents’ best interests, because a daughter with an unsupportive partner would profit more from extra help than her more fortunate sisters (the principle of diminishing returns on investment). By helping their needier daughters, parents maximized their total number of surviving grandchildren.
But this unequal investment created an incentive for daughters to “exploit” their parents’ generosity by choosing a partner who was less supportive. A daughter who was less picky than her sisters would accept a less helpful partner, but since her parents picked up the slack she ended up with a similar amount of support, while sparing herself the costs of holding out for the perfect man.
As a result, the choosiness of females gradually declined over evolutionary time. To counterbalance this, the parental preference for caring sons-in-law increased. Hence the conflict.

Can you trust a man with a wide face?
Researchers have found evidence that a man with a wide face is likely to be very aggressive, less trustworthy, and prone to lying.
And the latest study indicates a wide face can generate a social ripple effect, causing others to act selfishly as they seek to do unto him before he does unto them.
Not only were the wider-faced guys more likely to claim as much of the wealth as possible for themselves, if the partners thought the other guy had a wider face, or had been told he was likely to be aggressive, they reacted in kind.
Thus greed incites greed in others, and something as simple as the width of a human face may play a role in that.

Here are some of the problematic distortions:

• All-or-nothing thinking
• Catastrophizing
• Mind reading
• Personalizing
• Shoulds, musts and have-tos
• Comparisons

Five of psychology’s most practical tips:

1. Things aren’t always as they seem.
2. Empathy works
3. We are products of our environments
4. Don’t believe everything you read about psychology in the media.
5. Keep an open mind.

Psychology doesn’t have all the answers, but it certainly has some pretty good suggestions.

Scientists believed that they could look at the genome from cells taken in a cheek swab and be able to learn about the genomes of cells in the brain or the liver or anywhere else in the body. …
One woman discovered she was a chimera. In need of a kidney transplant, she was tested so that she might find a match. The results indicated that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.
Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother’s body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. It’s pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera.

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.
Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement.
There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever.

Your genome is 99.9% like the genomes of other human beings, although slight differences or gene variations within an individual’s genome make each person unique. Genomes are complicated: Some of your traits are mainly controlled by one gene, such as for instance the gene that determines if your hairline is straight or pointed in the center. Most traits are influenced by multiple genes: Characteristics such as height, for example, involve as many as 180 genes, and eye color is influenced by over a dozen. Most frequently, your traits – including your chance of developing some diseases – appear to result from interactions between your genes, your lifestyle, and the environment in which you live.

How we become what we are

５～１３世紀にオホーツク海沿岸などで独自の文化を発展させたオホーツク人の遺伝子を解読することに北大の研究グループが成功した。オホーツク人のルーツには諸説があるが、 現在の民族ではサハリンなどに暮らすニブヒやアムール川下流のウリチと遺伝的に最も近いことが分かり、北方からの渡来説が有力となった。アイヌ民族との共通性も判明、同グループはアイヌ民族の成り立ちについて「続縄文人・擦文人と、オホーツク人の両者がかかわったと考えられる」と推測している。大学院理学研究院の増田隆一准教授（進化遺伝学）らのグループで、日本人類学会の英語電子版「アンスロポロジカル・サイエンス」に発表した。
同グループは、道東・道北やサハリンの遺跡から発掘されたオホーツク人の人骨１０２体を分析。うち３７体から遺伝子の断片を取り出し、ＤＮＡを解読した。
その結果、ニブヒやウリチなど北東アジアの諸民族だけが高い比率で持っている ハプログループＹ遺伝子がオホーツク人にもあり、遺伝子グループ全体の特徴でもニブヒなど共通性が強いことが分かった。
現在、カムチャツカ半島に暮らすイテリメン、コリヤークとの遺伝的つながりも見られた。

Как известно, между близкими людьми часто существует такая тесная связь, что они способны чувствовать друг друга на большом расстоянии. Наибольшая вероятность таких чудес возникает в момент, когда кто-то попадает в критическую ситуацию или же в момент смерти, считают парапсихологи. Много таких случаев происходило, к примеру, во время войны.

When individuals integrate into the life of a group, they often adopt the values, norms and behaviours valued by the group in order to be accepted. People who model their behaviour on other group members can be described as conformist.
Unlike socialization, in which individuals adapt to group life while preserving their autonomy ¯ conformism requires individuals to accept a set of group requirements and modify their behaviour to duplicate that of the other members in order to be accepted.
Conformism can be described as a process of submission to the majority which can reveal a need for security, a search for identification through membership to a group or a strategy for avoiding conflict.
Here are three processes through which individuals adapt their behaviour to group norms: acquiescence, internalization and identification.

Every language has a word expressing good in the sense of “having the right or desirable quality” (ἀρετή) and bad in the sense “undesirable”. A sense of moral judgement and a distinction “right and wrong, good and bad” are cultural universals.

The following are unique to humans:
abstraction in speech & thought; actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control; aesthetics; affection expressed and felt; age grades; age statuses; age terms; ambivalence; anthropomorphization; anticipation; antonyms; attachment; baby talk; belief in supernatural/religion; beliefs, false; beliefs about death; beliefs about disease; beliefs about fortune and misfortune; binary cognitive distinctions; biological mother and social mother normally the same person; black (color term); body adornment; childbirth customs; childcare; childhood fears; childhood fear of loud noises; childhood fear of strangers; choice making (choosing alternatives); classification; classification of age; classification of behavioral propensities; classification of body parts; classification of colors; classification of fauna; classification of flora; classification of inner states; classification of kin; classification of sex; classification of space; classification of tools; classification of weather conditions; coalitions; collective identities; conflict; conflict, consultation to deal with; conflict, means of dealing with; conflict, mediation of; conjectural reasoning; containers; continua (ordering as cognitive pattern); contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes (meaningful elements in language); cooking; cooperation; cooperative labor; copulation normally conducted in privacy; corporate (perpetual) statuses; coyness display; critical learning periods; crying; cultural variability; culture; culture/nature distinction; customary greetings; daily routines; dance; death rituals; decision making; decision making, collective; differential valuations; directions, giving of; discrepancies between speech, thought, and action; dispersed groups; distinguishing right and wrong; diurnality; divination; division of labor; division of labor by age; division of labor by sex; dominance/submission; dreams; dream interpretation; economic inequalities; economic inequalities, consciousness of; emotions; empathy; entification (treating patterns and relations as things); environment, adjustments to; envy; envy, symbolic means of coping with; ethnocentrism; etiquette; explanation; face (word for); facial communication; facial expression of anger; facial expression of contempt; facial expression of disgust; facial expression of fear; facial expression of happiness; facial expression of surprise; facial expressions, masking/modifying of; fairness (equity), concept of; family (or household); father and mother, separate kin terms for; fears; fear of death; fears, ability to overcome some; feasting; females do more direct childcare; figurative speech; fire; folklore; food preferences; food sharing; future, attempts to predict; generosity admired; gestures; gift giving; good and bad distinguished; gossip; government; grammar; group living; groups that are not based on family; habituation; hairstyles; hand (word for); healing the sick (or attempting to); hope; hospitality; husband older than wife on average; hygienic care; identity, collective; imagery; incest between mother and son unthinkable or tabooed; incest, prevention or avoidance; in-group distinguished from out-group(s); in-group biases in favor of; inheritance rules; institutions (organized co-activities); insulting; intention; interest in bioforms (living things or things that resemble them); interpolation; interpreting behavior; intertwining (e.g., weaving); jokes; judging others; kin, close distinguished from distant; kin groups; kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation; kinship statuses; language; language employed to manipulate others; language employed to misinform or mislead; language is translatable; language not a simple reflection of reality; language, prestige from proficient use of; law (rights and obligations); law (rules of membership); leaders; lever; likes and dislikes; linguistic redundancy; logical notions; logical notion of “and”; logical notion of “equivalent”; logical notion of “general/particular”; logical notion of “not”; logical notion of “opposite”; logical notion of “part/whole”; logical notion of “same”; magic; magic to increase life; magic to sustain life; magic to win love; making comparisons; male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures; males dominate public/political realm; males engage in more coalitional violence; males more aggressive; males more prone to lethal violence; males more prone to theft; males, on average, travel greater distances over lifetime; manipulate social relations; marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical levels; marriage; materialism; meal times; mearning, most units of are non-universal; measuring; medicine; melody; memory; mental maps; mentalese; metaphor; metonym; mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances; moral sentiments; moral sentiments, limited effective range of; morphemes; mother normally has consort during child-rearing years; mourning; murder proscribed; music; music, children’s; music related in part to dance; music related in part to religious activity; music seen as art (a creation); music, vocal; music, vocal, includes speech forms; musical redundancy; musical reptition; musical variation; myths; narrative; nomenclature (perhaps the same as classification); nonbodily decorative art; normal distinguished from abnormal states; nouns; numerals (counting); Oedipus complex; oligarchy (de facto); one (numeral); onomatopoeia; overestimating objectivity of thought; pain; past/present/future; person, concept of; personal names; phonemes; phonemes defined by set of minimally constrasting features; phonemes, merging of; phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number; phonemic change, inevitability of; phonemic change, rules of; phonemic system; planning; planning for future; play; play to perfect skills; poetry/rhetoric; poetic line, uniform length range; poetic lines characterized by repetition and variation; poetic lines demarcated by pauses; polysemy (one word has several meanings); possessive, intimate; possessive, loose; practice to improve skills; precedence, concept of (that’s how the leopard got its spots); preference for own children and close kin (nepotism); prestige inequalities; pretend play; pride; private inner life; promise; pronouns; pronouns, minimum two numbers; pronouns, minimum three persons; proper names; property; proverbs, sayings; proverbs, sayings – in mutually contradictory forms; psychological defense mechanisms; rape; rape proscribed; reciprocal exchanges (0f labor, goods, or services); reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation); regocnition of individuals by face; redress of wrongs; resistance to abuse of poser, to dominance; rhythm; right-handedness as population norm; risk-taking; rites of passage; rituals; role and personality seen in dynamic interrlationship (i.e., departures from role can be explained in terms of individual personality); sanctions; sanctions fro crimes against the collectivity; sanctions include removal from the social unit; self-control; self distinguished from other; self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous; self as subject and object; self-image, awareness of (concern for what others think); self-image, manipulation of; self-image, wanted to be positive; self is responsible; semantics; semantic category of affecting things and people; semantic category of dimension; semantic category of giving; semantic category of location; semantic category of motion; semantic category of other physical properties; semantic components; semantic components, generation; semantic components, sex; sememes, commonly used ones are short, infrequently used ones are longer; senses unified; sex differences in spatial cognition and behavior; sex (gender) terminology is fundamentally binary; sex statuses; sexual attraction; sexual attractiveness; sexual jealousy; sexual modesty; sexual regulation; sexual regulation includes incest prevention; sexuality as focus of interest; shame; shelter; sickness and death seen as related; snakes, wariness around; social structure; socialization; socialization expected from senior kin; socialization includes toilet training; spear; special speech for special occasions; statuses and roles; statuses, ascribed and achieved; statuses distinguished from individuals; statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases; stinginess, disapproval of; stop/nonstop contrasts (in speech sounds); succession; sucking wounds; sweets preferred; symbolism; symbolic speech; synesthetic metaphors; synonyms; taboos; tabooed foods; tabooed utterances; taxonomy; territoriality; thumb sucking; tickling; time; time, cyclicity of; tools; tool dependency; tool making; tools for cutting; tools to make tools; tools patterned culturally; tools, permament; tools for pounding; toys, playthings; trade; triangular awareness (assessinjg relationships among the self and two other people); true and false distinguished); turn-taking; two (numeral); tying material (i.e., something like string); units of time; verbs; violence, some forms of proscribed; visiting; vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes; vowel contrasts; weaning; weapons; weather control (attempts to); while (color term); world view.

I’ve always found that, with humor, some will find fault where others find favor. I didn’t need confirmation of this, but I received it via an online comment, from “mgbdesign,” who wrote:

On the personal nature of humor: I was an exhibit designer at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, working on an exhibit of Gary Larson’s work that was to travel. I had xeroxed (ha!) copies of some 450 cartoons, and was editing them to fit into a number of panels, each to present 16 original cartoons. I was down to my last bunch just around dinner time. At a large table at my favorite Greek restaurant, I plopped down my “really not funny rejects” pile, face up on the table and continued to sort. The waiter came over and looked at the top image on my reject pile and told me it was his all time favorite! Oh well…

… there is a monotonic relationship between the frequency of sexual activity and wage returns.
… sexual activity may be of interest to economists, and it may serve as a framework for integrating the existing evidence, as well as for structuring future research efforts. Indeed, contemporary social analysis suggests that health, cognitive and non-cognitive skills and personality are important factors that affect wage level, life and job satisfaction, cognitive functioning and reasoning ability. Sexual activity may also be of interest to social scientists, since sexual activity is considered to be a barometer for health, quality of life, well-being and happiness. Social scientists can take advantage of this parameter in order to shed light on individuals’ needs.

I propose to take an income no greater than $50,000 per annum! Beyond this I need ever earn, make no effort to increase my fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes! Let us cast aside business forever, except for others. Let us settle in Oxford and I shall get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary men. I figure that this will take three years active work. I shall pay especial attention to speaking in public. We can settle in London and I can purchase a controlling interest in some newspaper or live review and give the general management of it attention, taking part in public matters, especially those connected with education and improvement of the poorer classes. Man must have no idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry! No idol is more debasing than the worship of money! Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five, but during these ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically!

“L’homme est né libre” mais partout on le voit soumis à des mécanismes, des mécanismes mentaux ou sociaux. Les sciences de l’homme ont toujours pris au sérieux cette métaphore de la machine humaine ou sociale : le système auto-régulé de A. Smith, le structuralisme, les sciences cognitives. Aujourd’hui, la robotique, le génie génétique, les nanotechnologies pourraient transformer en réalité ce qui n’est encore que du domaine de la théorie ou de la spéculation. Les automates qui nous remplaceront seront débarrassés de cet appendice encombrant, la conscience. Le tragique aura définitivement disparu de leur existence.

La mécanisation de l’esprit a donc beaucoup de progrès à faire ; elle s’y emploiera tant est forte la tentation de fuir le tragique de la condition humaine dans le dépassement de l’homme par la machine.

The Labyrinth of Solitude
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.

I don’t believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.”

なにを隠そう私は運び屋である。この稼業に就いて、かれこれ6年になる。当然、捕まったことは一度もない。世間一般に言うところの運び屋は、違法なブツを扱う黒い運び屋と相場が決まっている。しかし、世の中には白い運び屋というものが存在するのだ。
この仕事で世界中あちこちに行った。タイ、ベトナム、シンガポール、マレーシア、インドネシア、フィリピン、インド、台湾、韓国、イギリス、チュニジア、ブラジル、アメリカ、カナダ。中国とメキシコにはもう何回行ったか。。。この2ヶ国については、空港のある都市を全国制覇しつつある。
タイに週3回、メキシコに週2回、香港に日帰りで行ったこともある。中国にいたっては、一時期は毎日行っていた。夜に最終便で中国に飛び、翌日の昼に帰国する。その繰り返し。空港の近くに住めば、上海も広州も充分通勤圏内なんだと思った。
ネットの旅系掲示板に「ハンドキャリー経験した人いませんか？」というスレを見つけた。それに対するレスは、「ハイリスクハイリターン」だの、「ヤバい仕事」だの。。。この仕事はすでにやっている人からの紹介で決まるのでほとんど求人が出回らない。実体がよくわからず、半ば都市伝説化しているのだろう。
知らないうちに黒い運び屋に仕立て上げられ、海外で懲役刑や死刑判決が下された日本人も実際にいる。しかし、その人たちには実に気の毒だが、その仕事が白か黒か見分けがつかなかった時点で、人材としては完全にアウトなのだ。

Motivated by a growing literature in the social sciences suggesting that the transition to fatherhood has a profound effect on men’s values, we study how the wages of employees change after a male chief executive officer (CEO) has children, using comprehensive panel data on the employees, CEOs, and families of CEOs in all but the smallest Danish firms between 1996 and 2006. We find that (a) a male CEO generally pays his employees less generously after fathering a child, (b) the birth of a daughter has a less negative influence on wages than does the birth of a son and has a positive influence if the daughter is the CEO’s first, and (c) the wages of female employees are less adversely affected than are those of male employees and positively affected by the CEO’s first child of either gender. We also find that male CEOs pay themselves more after fathering a child, especially after fathering a son. These results are consistent with a desire by the CEO to husband more resources for his family after fathering a child and the psychological priming of the CEO’s generosity after the birth of his first daughter and specifically toward women after the birth of his first child of either gender.

In 2010, life expectancy for the black population was 3.8 years lower than that of the white population. This difference was due to higher death rates for the black population for heart disease, cancer, homicide, diabetes, and perinatal conditions.
Life expectancy at birth increased from 70.8 years in 1970 to 78.7 years in 2010 for the total population (an 11% increase). For white persons, the increase was from 71.7 years to 78.9 years (10% increase), and for black persons from 64.1 years to 75.1 years (17% increase). The gap in life expectancy between the white and black populations has decreased, from 7.6 years in 1970 to 3.8 years in 2010, but the disparity still exists.

An information board outside the Petrou Ralli immigration police headquarters in Athens, where migrants line up to apply for a renewal of asylum.

Police brutality is a fact. There is no eye, no non-governmental organisation constantly inside the detention centres.

Greece has suffered a severe backlash against migrants, legal and illegal, as a six-year recession has driven unemployment to 27 percent. Coupled with this, Greece has over the past two decades become Europe’s frontline immigration state.

Average approval rates for political asylum are 0.25 percent in the first committee and 9 percent in the second committee.

“What shall we do? Await a slow death?”

Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function. It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

It is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself.

Judgments we make with a moral underpinning are made more quickly and are more extreme than those same judgments based on practical considerations. However, judgments based on morality can be readily shifted and made with other considerations in mind.

People often think that something must have a mind to be part of a moral interaction. However, the present research suggests that minds do not create morality but that morality creates minds. In four experiments, we found that observing intentional harm to an unconscious entity—a vegetative patient, a robot, or a corpse—leads to augmented attribution of mind to that entity. A fifth experiment reconciled these results with extant research on dehumanization by showing that observing the victimization of conscious entities leads to reduced attribution of mind to those entities. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the effects of victimization vary according to victims’ preexisting mental status and that people often make an intuitive cognitive error when unconscious entities are placed in harm’s way. People assume that if apparent moral harm occurs, then there must be someone there to experience that harm—a harm-made mind. These findings have implications for political policies concerning right-to-life issues.

The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action. Part of this machinery was designed b the blind hand of Darwinian selection millions of years before our species evolved; other parts were added or upgraded over the evolutionary history of our species, and are unique both to humans and to our moral psychology.

People seem to believe that having a mind allows an entity to be part of a moral interaction — to do good and bad things, or to have good and bad things done to them.

The relationship may actually work the other way around: Minds don’t create morality, morality creates minds.

Как правило, мы испытываем сочувствие к другим живым существам, если те оказываются в сложной ситуации. Но, как выяснилось, то же самое мы можем испытывать и по отношению к неодушевленным объектам. Причем в этом случае мы воспринимаем их как одушевленные и наделяем разумом.
…
Как видите, исследование дает массу поводов для размышлений. Выходит, люди скорее склонны по-настоящему сочувствовать животным или машинам, а не своим собратьям? Или, на худой конец, чтобы получить свою долю сочувствия, надо быть в чем-то ущербным, скажем, умственно неполноценным? Возможно, в этой особенности нашего мышления кроется одна из причин так часто встречающегося отсутствия взаимопонимания между человеческими особями…

・・・そのなかにはいくつものミトコンドリアＤＮＡのタイプがあったはずですが、結局はただ一つのタイプを除いて最終的に現在まで子孫を残すことなく人類の歴史の中に消えていきました。初期の人類のたった一人の女性が持っていたミトコンドリアＤＮＡが、後に世界中の人々が持つミトコンドリアＤＮＡのタイプを生み出したのです。

Ｙ染色体亜型の世界的分布

The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.