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POPS10 Things you might be better off not knowing! The average male foot exudes half a pint of sweat each day. A person will pass about 11,000 gallons of urine in a lifetime. A man weighing 200lb would provide enough meat to feed 100 cannibals in one sitting.
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POPSClues to Why We Dream at All ... In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.” Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.” ...
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POPSthe Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind "To a certain extent, memories are societal properties," says Adam Kolber, a visiting professor at Princeton. "We really need to articulate a moral code that governs all this," warns Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.
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POPS Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.
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POPSWhat are the limits of life? The Chihuahuan Desert: Scientists have found that about half of the organisms at Cuatro Cienegas are most closely related to marine life, even though the oases here have not been in contact with the ocean for tens of millions of years. The Intensive Care Unit: “We keep inventing new antibiotics, but bacteria evolve resistance almost immediately, so we’re constantly playing catch-up,” he says. “How can we make the best use of the antibiotics we’ve got now? We’re using mathematical models to generate hypotheses about how we can shape and alter prescription practice to minimize or delay the evolution of resistance.” “It’s Darwinism at its finest,”
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POPSDNA test shows Hitler skull is that of a woman A year later, skull fragments were dug up by Russian forces which seemed to confirm Hitler had shot himself in the bunker. In 1970, the KGB cremated Hitler’s remains except for the skull fragment. Dr Bellantoni was sceptical about the theory the skull fragments belong to Eva Braun, who was with Hitler in the bunker where he supposedly died. "There is no report of Eva Braun having shot herself or having been shot afterwards. It could be anyone. Many people were killed around the bunker area," he said.
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POPSLiteral Answers to Rhetorical Questions
>>People commonly ask empty rhetorical questions that rarely receive any sort of sensible answer. When you have had your surfeit of poetical whimsy and are ready for some good, hard facts, come here to be set straight.The world would be much improved if those engaging in windy musings were more often brought up short by a nice, sharp definition or a pointed rebuke. Even the fantastical William Shakespeare, asking himself "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?" goes on (admittedly at excessive length) to list a number of reasons for answering in the negative.Of course, some questions are so ill-framed as to admit of no sensible answer. Example: Where have you been all my life? It so happens that this question has never been addressed to me; but if it were I should be at a loss to detail the many addresses at which I have resided and worked during the span of existence of some other person, even if I knew that person's precise date of birth. Such idle musings are best ignored.<<
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POPSShrunken Heads Could Tell Political Tale "This small scale agrarian society was succeeded by an empire with regional authority," said Ryan Willams, curator of Chicago's Field Museum, in a press release. "For the first time people were governed by others who lived hundreds of miles distant. Understanding how this came about may help us better understand how these forms of government first emerged."
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POPSMinds and myths "..Other sciences certainly do have their own myths – just think of the story of Newton and the falling apple or Archimedes leaping out of the bath following his Eureka insight. Perhaps myths just seem more prominent in psychology because we tend to talk and write about our science in terms of studies rather than facts."
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POPSWe Feel Like The Ghost, Not The Machine
" But it's time to bring experience back. Neuroscience has effectively investigated the sound waves, but it has missed the music. Although reductionism has its uses -- it is, for instance, absolutely crucial for helping us develop new pharmaceutical treatments for mental illnesses -- its limitations are too significant to allow us to answer our biggest questions. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse? Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to distill the details of our psychological experience into prose. That's why her novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a l
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