Many people take the commonsense view that color is an objective property of things, or of the light that bounces off them. They say a tree's leaves are green because they reflect green light — a greenness that is just as real as the leaves. Others argue that color doesn't inhabit the physical world at all but exists only in the eye or mind of the viewer. They maintain that if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to see it, its leaves would be colorless — and so would everything else. They say there is no such thing as color; there are only the people who see it. Both positions are, in a way, correct. Color is objective and subjective — "the place," as Paul Cézanne put it, "where our brain and the universe meet." Color is created when light from the world is registered by the eyes and interpreted by the brain.

Kids tire of their toys, college students get sick of cafeteria food, and sooner or later most of us lose interest in our favorite TV shows. The bottom line is that we humans are easily bored. But why should this be true? The answer lies buried deep in our nerve cells, which are designed to reduce their initial excited response to stimuli each time they occur. At the same time, these neurons enhance their responses to things that change — especially things that change quickly. We probably evolved this way because our ancestors got more survival value, for example, from attending to what was moving in a tree (such as a puma) than to the tree itself. Boredom in reaction to an unchanging environment turns down the level of neural excitation so that new stimuli (like our ancestor's hypothetical puma threat) stand out more. It's the neural equivalent of turning off a front door light to see the fireflies.

Some countries have proposed tougher guidelines for determining brain death when transplantation — transferring organs to others — is under consideration. In several European countries, there are legal requirements which specify that a whole team of doctors must agree over the diagnosis of death in the case of a potential donor. The reason for these strict regulations for diagnosing brain death in potential organ donors is, no doubt, to ease public fears of a premature diagnosis of brain death for the purpose of obtaining organs. But it is questionable whether these requirements reduce public suspicions as much as they create them. They certainly maintain mistaken beliefs that diagnosing brain death is an unreliable process lacking precision. As a matter of consistency, at least, criteria for diagnosing the deaths of organ donors should be exactly the same as for those for whom immediate burial or cremation is intended.

The term minimalism gives a negative impression to some people who think that it is all about sacrificing valuable possessions. This insecurity naturally stems from their attachment to their possessions. It is difficult to distance oneself from something that has been around for quite some time. Being an emotional animal, human beings give meaning to the things around them. So, the question arising here is that if minimalism will hurt one's emotions, why become a minimalist? The answer is very simple; the assumption of the question is fundamentally wrong. Minimalism does not hurt emotions. You might feel a bit sad while getting rid of a useless item but sooner than later, this feeling will be overcome by the joy of clarity. Minimalists never argue that you should leave every convenience of the modern era. They are of the view that you only need to eliminate stuff that is unused or not going to be used in the near future.

A remarkable characteristic of the visual system is that it has the ability of adapting itself. Psychologist George M Stratton made this clear in an impressive self-experiment. Stratton wore reversing glasses for several days, which literally turned the world upside down for him. In the beginning, this caused him great difficulties: just putting food in his mouth with a fork was a challenge for him. With time, however, his visual system adjusted to the new stimuli from reality, and he was able to act normally in his environment again, even seeing it upright when he concentrated. As he took off his reversing glasses, he was again confronted with problems: he used the wrong hand when he wanted to reach for something, for example. Fortunately, Stratton could reverse the perception, and he did not have to wear reversing glasses for the rest of his life. For him, everything returned to normal after one day.

articipants in a study were asked to answer questions like "Why does the moon have phases?" Half the participants were told to search for the answers on the internet, while the other half weren't allowed to do so. Then, in the second part of the study, all of the participants were presented with a new set of questions, such as "Why does Swiss cheese have holes?" These questions were unrelated to the ones asked during the first part of the study, so participants who used the internet had absolutely no advantage over those who hadn't. You would think that both sets of participants would be equally sure or unsure about how well they could answer the new questions. But those who used the internet in the first part of the study rated themselves as more knowledgeable than those who hadn't, even about questions they hadn't searched online for. The study suggests that having access to unrelated information was enough to pump up their intellectual confidence.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggests that we tend to understand the world by focusing in on particular features within it. Take platypuses. We might zoom in so closely to their fur that each hair appears different. We might also zoom out to the extent where it appears as a single, uniform object. We might take the platypus as an individual, or we might treat it as part of a larger unit such as a species or an ecosystem. It's possible to move between many of these perspectives, although we may need some additional tools and skills to zoom in on individual pieces of hair or zoom out to entire ecosystems. Crucially, however, we can only take up one perspective at a time. We can pay attention to the varied behavior of individual animals, look at what unites them into a single species, or look at them as part of bigger ecological patterns. Every possible perspective involves emphasizing certain aspects and ignoring others.

Plato's realism includes all aspects of experience but is most easily explained by considering the nature of mathematical and geometrical objects such as circles. He asked the question, what is a circle? You might indicate a particular example carved into stone or drawn in the sand. However, Plato would point out that, if you looked closely enough, you would see that neither it, nor indeed any physical circle, was perfect. They all possessed flaws, and all were subject to change and decayed with time. So how can we talk about perfect circles if we cannot actually see or touch them? Plato's extraordinary answer was that the world we see is a poor reflection of a deeper unseen reality of Forms, or universals, where perfect cats chase perfect mice in perfect circles around perfect rocks. Plato believed that the Forms or universals are the true reality that exists in an invisible but perfect world beyond our senses.

The adolescent brain is not fully developed until its early twenties. This means the way the adolescents' decision-making circuits integrate and process information may put them at a disadvantage. One of their brain regions that matures later is the prefrontal cortex, which is the control center, tasked with thinking ahead and evaluating consequences. It is the area of the brain responsible for preventing you from sending off an initial angry text and modifying it with kinder words. On the other hand, the limbic system matures earlier, playing a central role in processing emotional responses. Because of its earlier development, it is more likely to influence decision-making. Decision-making in the adolescent brain is led by emotional factors more than the perception of consequences. Due to these differences, there is an imbalance between feeling-based decision-making ruled by the more mature limbic system and logical-based decision-making by the not-yet-mature prefrontal cortex. This may explain why some teens are more likely to make bad decisions.

The decline in the diversity of our food is an entirely human-made process. The biggest loss of crop diversity came in the decades that followed the Second World War. In an attempt to save millions from extreme hunger, crop scientists found ways to produce grains such as rice and wheat on an enormous scale. And thousands of traditional varieties were replaced by a small number of new super-productive ones. The strategy worked spectacularly well, at least to begin with. Because of it, grain production tripled, and between 1970 and 2020 the human population more than doubled. Leaving the contribution of that strategy to one side, the danger of creating more uniform crops is that they are more at risk when it comes to disasters. Specifically, a global food system that depends on just a narrow selection of plants has a greater chance of not being able to survive diseases, pests and climate extremes.

Many of the first models of cultural evolution drew noticeable connections between culture and genes by using concepts from theoretical population genetics and applying them to culture. Cultural patterns of transmission, innovation, and selection are conceptually likened to genetic processes of transmission, mutation, and selection. However, these approaches had to be modified to account for the differences between genetic and cultural transmission. For example, we do not expect the cultural transmission to follow the rules of genetic transmission strictly. If two biological parents have different forms of a cultural trait, their child is not necessarily equally likely to acquire the mother's or father's form of that trait. Further, a child can acquire cultural traits not only from its parents but also from nonparental adults and peers; thus, the frequency of a cultural trait in the population is relevant beyond just the probability that an individual's parents had that trait.

Digital technologies are essentially related to metaphors, but digital metaphors are different from 1. linguistic ones in important ways. 2. Linguistic metaphors are passive, in the sense that the audience needs to choose to actively 2. enter the world proposed by metaphor. 3. In the Shakespearean metaphor "time is a beggar," the audience is unlikely to understand the 3. metaphor without cognitive effort and without further engaging Shakespeare's prose. 4. Technological metaphors, on the other hand, are active (and often imposing) in the sense that 4. they are realized in digital artifacts that are actively doing things, forcefully changing a user's 4. meaning horizon. 5. Technological creators cannot generally afford to require their potential audience to wonder how 5. the metaphor works; normally the selling point is that the usefulness of the technology is 5. obvious at first glance. 6. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is beloved in part because the meaning of his works is not 6. immediately obvious and requires some thought on the part of the audience.

The best defence most species of octopus have is to stay hidden as much as possible and do their own hunting at night. So to find one in full view in the shallows in daylight was a surprise for two Australian underwater photographers. Actually, what they saw at first was a flounder. It was only when they looked again that they saw a medium-sized octopus, with all eight of its arms folded and its two eyes staring upwards to create the illusion. An octopus has a big brain, excellent eyesight and the ability to change colour and pattern, and this one was using these assets to turn itself into a completely different creature. Many more of this species have been found since then, and there are now photographs of octopuses that could be said to be transforming into sea snakes. And while they mimic, they hunt — producing the spectacle of, say, a flounder suddenly developing an octopodian arm, sticking it down a hole and grabbing whatever's hiding there.

When I worked for a large electronics company that manufactured laser and ink-jet printers, I soon discovered why there are often three versions of many consumer goods. If the manufacturer makes only one version of its product, people who bought it might have been willing to spend more money, so the company is losing some income. If the company offers two versions, one with more features and more expensive than the other, people will compare the two models and still buy the less expensive one. But if the company introduces a third model with even more features and more expensive than the other two, sales of the second model go up; many people like the features of the most expensive model, but not the price. The middle item has more features than the least expensive one, and it is less expensive than the fanciest model. They buy the middle item, unaware that they have been manipulated by the presence of the higher-priced item.

On-screen, climate disaster is everywhere you look, but the scope of the world's climate transformation may just as quickly eliminate the climate-fiction genre — indeed eliminate any effort to tell the story of warming, which could grow too large and too obvious even for Hollywood. You can tell stories ‘about' climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life. But when the temperature rises by three or four more degrees, hardly anyone will be able to feel isolated from its impacts. And so as climate change expands across the horizon, it may cease to be a story. Why watch or read climate fiction about the world you can see plainly out your own window? At the moment, stories illustrating global warming can still offer an escapist pleasure, even if that pleasure often comes in the form of horror. But when we can no longer pretend that climate suffering is distant — in time or in place — we will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.

As individuals, our ability to thrive depended on how well we navigated relationships in a group. If the group valued us, we could count on support, resources, and probably a mate. If it didn't, we might get none of these merits. It was a matter of survival, physically and genetically. Over millions of years, the pressure selected for people who are sensitive to and skilled at maximizing their standing. The result was the development of a tendency to unconsciously monitor how other people in our community perceive us. We process that information in the form of self-esteem and such related emotions as pride, shame, or insecurity. These emotions compel us to do more of what makes our community value us and less of what doesn't. And, crucially, they are meant to make that motivation feel like it is coming from within. If we realized, on a conscious level, that we were responding to social pressure, our performance might come off as grudging or cynical, making it less persuasive.

Conventional medicine has long believed that depression is caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. However, there is a major problem with this explanation. This is because the imbalance of substances in the brain is a consequence of depression, not its cause. In other words, depression causes a decrease in brain substances such as serotonin and noradrenaline, not a decrease in brain substances causes depression. In this revised cause-and-effect, the key is to reframe depression as a problem of consciousness. Our consciousness is a more fundamental entity that goes beyond the functioning of the brain. The brain is no more than an organ of consciousness. If it is not consciousness itself, then the root cause of depression is also a distortion of our state of consciousness: a consciousness that has lost its sense of self and the meaning of life. Such a disease of consciousness may manifest itself in the form of depression.

The common accounts of human nature that float around in society are generally a mixture of assumptions, tales and sometimes plain silliness. However, psychology is different. It is the branch of science that is devoted to understanding people: how and why we act as we do; why we see things as we do; and how we interact with one another. The key word here is ‘science.' Psychologists don't depend on opinions and hearsay, or the generally accepted views of society at the time, or even the considered opinions of deep thinkers. Instead, they look for evidence, to make sure that psychological ideas are firmly based, and not just derived from generally held beliefs or assumptions. In addition to this evidence-based approach, psychology deals with fundamental processes and principles that generate our rich cultural and social diversity, as well as those shared by all human beings. These are what modern psychology is all about.

Punishing a child may not be effective due to what Álvaro Bilbao, a neuropsychologist, calls ‘trick-punishments.' A trick-punishment is a scolding, a moment of anger or a punishment in the most classic sense of the word. Instead of discouraging the child from doing something, it encourages them to do it. For example, Hugh learns that when he hits his little brother, his mother scolds him. For a child who feels lonely, being scolded is much better than feeling invisible, so he will continue to hit his brother. In this case, his mother would be better adopting a different strategy. For instance, she could congratulate Hugh when he has not hit his brother for a certain length of time. The mother clearly cannot allow the child to hit his little brother, but instead of constantly pointing out the negatives, she can choose to reward the positives. In this way, any parent can avoid trick-punishments. A trick-punishment reinforces the unwanted behavior of a child, which implies that parents should focus on reducing the attention to negatives while rewarding positive behaviors.

For their final project, students in Ms. Nam's English class are giving group presentations about Korean culture. Minji: Before we start, guess what this is! QUIZ! This is a team sport. It used to be an Olympic event. Stepping forward means your defeat. Players use a long rope. Yes, the answer is juldarigi or tug of war. This is the topic of our presentation. You all must have played this game at least once because it is juldarigi that often highlights a school sports day. I still remember the tension I felt just before starting to pull. The moments of joy and disappointment were also unforgettable. However, this isn't just a school sport. In 2015, juldarigi was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list under the heading of Tugging Rituals and Games. As we researched this cultural heritage, we learned a lot of new and interesting facts.

Jinho: Nobody knows exactly when the juldarigi tradition started in Korea, but our ancestors must have performed it for hundreds of years. The first historical record appeared in Donggungnyeojiseungnam (1481). The book says that it was widely popular in the middle and southern parts of Korea where rice farming was common. Juldarigi was regarded not just as a sport but also as a ritual. In the juldarigi ritual, a series of actions were usually performed in the same way: making the ropes, holding ceremonies, tugging the ropes, and staging special events after the game. Juldarigi might have been a perfect way to help people cooperate and promote the harmony and unity of the community. In Korea, many towns have cherished this tradition, and some towns, such as Gijisi, Yeongsan, Samcheok, Gamnae, and Uiryeong, have developed it into exciting festivals.

Sumi: Look at this slide. What do the ropes look like? Juldarigi ropes vary in shape and design from region to region. The rope used in Yeongsan and Gijisi juldarigi, with smaller ones attached to it, looks like a giant centipede. The rope used in Gamnae juldarigi is made to look like a crab in order to express the participants' wish to catch more crabs. After the game is over, people in some areas cut the rope into smaller pieces and bring them home. They throw the pieces onto the roof or hang them on the gate of their home. Some people believe that these ropes can bring a good harvest, health, and peace to their families. Interestingly, Gijisi juldarigi ropes are believed to help couples have a child, cure backaches, and bring good luck to the families that own them.

Dongho: Last April, I took part in the Gijisi Juldarigi Festival, held in Dangjin, Chungcheongnam-do. At first, I couldn't believe my eyes. The size of the rope was unbelievable. It was about 200 meters long and one meter thick, weighing over 40 tons. Thousands of people gathered and pulled the "centipede" rope to win. Even though both teams tried their best, it was my team that won. Actually, which team wins is not that important. By tradition, participants are divided into two teams by township: one team from susang, the northern area, and the other from suha, the southern area. They say that the country will be peaceful if the former team wins, and that it will have a good harvest if the latter wins. I was happy because I learned that I helped bring a good harvest! It was wonderful to experience traditional Korean culture in the spirit of cooperation. Most of all, it was fun. Minji: Now, what does juldarigi mean to you? While preparing our presentation, we learned that juldarigi isn't unique to Korea or other Asian countries. However, Korean juldarigi rituals reflect our history and culture and have contributed to the harmony and unity of communities. What is important is for us to inherit and further develop our traditional juldarigi for future generations.

You may think that tug of war is just a playground event for children or an exercise for adults that helps build a team spirit. In fact, it was a team sport in the Olympics from 1900 to 1920. Interestingly, a country could send more than one team to the Olympics, so it could earn multiple medals in the event. For example, the United States won all three medals in 1904 when the Olympic Games were held in St Louis. Great Britain won all the medals in the 1908 London Olympics. Tug of war is not an Olympic event anymore. However, there is an international organization that is dedicated to the promotion of tug of war. It holds world championships every year and tries hard to get tug of war included again in the Olympics. The organization hopes that tug of war will regain its old glory. Will we soon be able to cheer for our national tug of war team to win a gold medal in the Olympics?