LINKS - September 18th, 2024
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.
Being Empathetic Is Easier when Everyone’s Doing It
By Elizabeth Svoboda, Scientific American
“Increasing empathy, says Stanford University social psychologist Jamil Zaki, will take more than teaching skills such as listening actively to others. Empathy is a socially motivated process, Zaki and other researchers say, meaning that people won’t necessarily empathize just because they know how. Instead—much as kids with athletic peers often want to excel at sports—people want to understand others when they enter into communities where empathy is the established norm.”
The Cognitive Magic of “Hi”
By Tom Roeper, The MIT Press Reader
“A child who says, ‘Hi, table’ already exhibits creativity and defies the popular doctrine of learning-by-imitation. What could lead a child to say ‘Hi, table’? He never hears anything like it—or does he? Parents now and then may talk about a highchair. Suppose the child thinks he hears ‘Hi, chair’ instead. In fact, all children do hear ‘high chair’ (highchair) or ‘high [some object].’ Now the problem has reversed itself. How does a child who hears ‘high chair’ avoid the conclusion that the person speaking has just said ‘Hi, chair’ and avoid deducing further that ‘Hi, truck’ is equally appropriate? (There are some intonational differences between hi chair and high chair, but that just makes the child’s task more difficult because intonational variety and creativity constitute another problem to be solved.)”
Brain goop that traps hunger neurons drives obesity
By Max Kozlov, Nature
“They found that this scaffolding became thicker and stickier within weeks of the mice starting the unhealthy diet. As these animals gained weight, their hypothalamus neurons became less able to process insulin normally, even when the hormone was injected directly into their brains. This suggests that the scaffolding’s stickiness stops insulin from getting into the brain. Instead, “it gets stuck”, says co-author Garron Dodd, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.”
Digging Into an Ancient Apocalypse Controversy From a Hopi Perspective
By Chip Colwell, Sapiens
“The assertions that Hancock makes promote dangerous racist thinking that impacts the Hopi people and other Indigenous communities. His theory appropriates recognition of the Hopi people’s sustainability, migration footprint, and adaptive accomplishments to the Grand Canyon, Chaco Canyon, and overall landscapes and ecosystems of the U.S. Southwest.
“Hancock’s narrative encourages dangerous voices that misrepresent established archaeological knowledge. These false historical narratives affect living cultures and their continued connections to their ancestral homelands.”
Read
A Fossilized Creature May Explain a Puzzling Painting on a Rock Wall
By Jack Tamisiea, The New York Times
“A paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One posits that this mythic monster was inspired by local fossils of long extinct animals. The author of the study suggests that the Indigenous southern African people who painted the Horned Serpent panel, the San, developed paleontological knowledge about their region that predated the contemporary Western approach to studying creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.”