"Fra Mauro’s map organized state-of-the-art knowledge about the world beyond Murano, but it was also art for the state. Venice was a mercantile superpower. World maps were not made for sailors, but for “intellectuals, aristocrats and members of government.” In the Venetian oligarchy, the three were much the same." - The Wall Street Journal
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. - Aeon
Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity. “If settled norms, practices, laws, and places are our roots, digital culture is uprooted and uprooting." - The New Atlantis
"Our frayed relationship with the very idea of the future has worried me for some time. It’s healthy for a society not to be unquestioningly, complacently Pollyanna-ish about what’s to come, but it’s also deeply unhealthy, and feels somehow un-American, for a society to recoil from even engaging with its future." - Slate
In theory, nothing about the brain’s squishy wetware prevents its internal states from being observed. “If you could measure every single neuron in the brain in real time, you could potentially decode everything that was percolating around in there.” - The Atlantic
The aristocratic regime of my generation, who would not sell out until “selling out” was gutted of any meaning, has collapsed, yet it is survived by the surprisingly powerful rump of an earlier regime, that of our parents. - Harper's
"It has struck me lately that the recurrent frenzy of destruction of prized objects in popular culture may tell us less about our current relationship to the past than it does about our fears for the future." - Public Books
The key finding was that, for the eminent creators, there was a higher connectivity, both within each hemisphere, the right and left, but particularly across them—and especially in the two key networks that many studies have identified as important for creative thinking, the default mode network and the executive control network. - Nautilus
Recent findings from the University of Montana and partners indicate that artificial intelligence can rival the creative abilities of the top 1% of human participants based on a standard test for creativity.
Modeling the creative process as a sequence of operations involving distinct brain networks does not correspond to a popular conception of creativity, which is usually represented as a momentum that seizes, transports, and surpasses us. - SciTech Daily
"The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration." - The Atlantic
Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley reconstructed Pink Floyd’s classic rock song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” using recordings of the brain activity of 29 patients who heard the song while undergoing brain surgery. - The Wall Street Journal
