LINKS - May 24th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference.
By Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine
“Perky asked participants to picture fruits while staring at a blank wall. As they did so, she secretly projected extremely faint images of those fruits — so faint as to be barely visible — on the wall and asked the participants if they saw anything. None of them thought they saw anything real, although they commented on how vivid their imagined image seemed. ‘If I hadn’t known I was imagining, I would have thought it real,’ one participant said.”
The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified
“For parents, posting can be hard to quit. Views, likes, and comments offer a form of positive reinforcement to parents, whose work is largely invisible and often thankless. ‘The most tangible proof of our work is children themselves,’ Sara Petersen, the author of the book Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, told me. ‘And sometimes it’s really just nice to post a cute photo and have 10 or 12 people say, “So cute.”’”
The ancient world’s largest fortresses: Persia’s northern defences in late antiquity
By Eberhard Sauer, Jebrael Nokandeh, Hamid Omrani Rekavandi, Mohammadreza Nemati, Mehdi Mousavinia, The Past
“In the 4th to 6th centuries AD, Persia was under attack from the north by the ‘White Huns’ and other powerful groups of steppe warriors. Persia’s response was to create a massive fortification belt – unsurpassed in scale anywhere in the ancient and medieval world, with only the possible exception of China. Eberhard Sauer, Jebrael Nokandeh, Hamid Omrani Rekavandi, Mohammadreza Nemati, and Mehdi Mousavinia have explored the backbone of the system: the densest concentration of mega-fortresses in the late antique world, in the Gorgan and Tehran Plains of Iran.”
Sought Out by Science, and Then Forgotten
By Jennie Erin Smith, Photographs by Charlie Cordero, The New York Times
“This Colombian region is now thought to house the second largest extended family with Huntington’s. Its members are of intense scientific interest because they hold clues to genetic modifiers of, and potential treatments for, Huntington’s disease. Yet since Dr. Daza’s untimely death in 2014, they have been cut off from a world of promising experimental treatments, genetic counseling and often basic medical care. Ms. Vásquez, like others in her generation, occasionally calls the disease by its 16th-century name, San Vito, or St. Vitus’ dance.”
The Mental Health Gender Gap
By Terri Apter Ph.D., Psychology Today
“Disappointingly, however, the authors claim that “we have little empirical evidence delineating the drivers of this gender gap.” Yet empirical evidence is precisely what we already have in a rich body of research that is ongoing and highly cited but inexplicably ignored by many now at the coalface of teen mental health.”