Last bits for the work day: Bad Brains and Good Brains
First the bad:
Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce
A prof at Stanford University is suing the estate of James Joyce over the estate's long practice of destroying documents vital to Joyce scholarship, and of intimidating academics and creators who want to study and extend the works of Joyce. Carol Shloss, a Joyce scholar, has worked for 15 years on a book about the ways in which the book Finnegans Wake was inspired by Joyce's mentally ill daughter. Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, have allegedly destroyed documents relating to this to undermine her book.
This isn't the first time that Stephen Joyce has hurt the cause of scholarship about his grandfather. He threatened to sue the Irish Museum over its exhibition of Joyce's papers. He threatened to sue pubs in Ireland for allowing people to read aloud from Joyce's novels on Bloomsday, the celebration of Ulysses. He told symphonic composers that they couldn't put Joyce quotations in their symphonies.
Now if Stephen Joyce isn't someone who's using their brain for bad things, I don't know who is. Some may even say he's like Hitler with all the document burning and authoritarian control... ;) (*smiles* and *ducks* when spirit_o_fire reads that.) Seriously, though, what is that guy's problem? James Joyce took a lot of flack for books like Ulysses--doesn't he deserve to have his posthumous voice heard clearly?
And now good--or at least positively interesting--brain stuff.
Backs to the Future
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans - a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind - the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
That's just really neat. I want to know more about their culture. Will have to research later.
Women's Brains React Surprisingly Fast to Erotic Images
Erotic images elicit faster and stronger electrical responses in a woman's brain than other images ranging from pleasant to disturbing.
The finding might not sound surprising, but researches did not expect responses to erotic images to emerge so quickly, apparently involving different circuits than the processing of other images.
See... brains are not only sexy, but they like sex, too. :)
I love the fact we're learning more about the brain. I love even more that we're not being held back by Puritanical social values that, in times past, would have quashed any study that even thought to explore sex and the brain.
Now if only our politicians were as smart...
Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce
A prof at Stanford University is suing the estate of James Joyce over the estate's long practice of destroying documents vital to Joyce scholarship, and of intimidating academics and creators who want to study and extend the works of Joyce. Carol Shloss, a Joyce scholar, has worked for 15 years on a book about the ways in which the book Finnegans Wake was inspired by Joyce's mentally ill daughter. Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, have allegedly destroyed documents relating to this to undermine her book.
This isn't the first time that Stephen Joyce has hurt the cause of scholarship about his grandfather. He threatened to sue the Irish Museum over its exhibition of Joyce's papers. He threatened to sue pubs in Ireland for allowing people to read aloud from Joyce's novels on Bloomsday, the celebration of Ulysses. He told symphonic composers that they couldn't put Joyce quotations in their symphonies.
Now if Stephen Joyce isn't someone who's using their brain for bad things, I don't know who is. Some may even say he's like Hitler with all the document burning and authoritarian control... ;) (*smiles* and *ducks* when spirit_o_fire reads that.) Seriously, though, what is that guy's problem? James Joyce took a lot of flack for books like Ulysses--doesn't he deserve to have his posthumous voice heard clearly?
And now good--or at least positively interesting--brain stuff.
Backs to the Future
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans - a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind - the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
That's just really neat. I want to know more about their culture. Will have to research later.
Women's Brains React Surprisingly Fast to Erotic Images
Erotic images elicit faster and stronger electrical responses in a woman's brain than other images ranging from pleasant to disturbing.
The finding might not sound surprising, but researches did not expect responses to erotic images to emerge so quickly, apparently involving different circuits than the processing of other images.
See... brains are not only sexy, but they like sex, too. :)
I love the fact we're learning more about the brain. I love even more that we're not being held back by Puritanical social values that, in times past, would have quashed any study that even thought to explore sex and the brain.
Now if only our politicians were as smart...