During the 19th century, feeling heads became quite a parlour game (next to opium and sniffing nitrous oxide). Francis Galton had pioneered the pseudoscience of phrenology whereby personality traits could be determined by the relative size of bumps and protrusions on the head. The idea was that mental faculties were localized in the brain and [...]
Entries from November 2008
November 23, 2008
Science Minister Has “Sixth Sense”
How did I miss this one?????
The Government’s new science minister Lord Drayson claims to have a ’sixth sense’ to predict the future and cites Malcolm Gladwell’s popular bestseller, “Blink” as a fascinating book that confirms his belief that humans have involved an intuitive supernatural ability.
Ka…thunk! The sound of a million jaws hitting the ground!
Oh well… [...]
November 23, 2008
Body & Soul
One of the oldest references to the division of the body and soul has been recently discovered in the ancient city of Sam’al near the modern city of Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee) in southeastern Turkey. Archaeologists from the University of Chicago discovered an inscribed 800-pound basalt stone monument called a “stele” that asked mourners to worship [...]
November 12, 2008
Ashes to Ashes, Fun to Funky
I have been waiting for a good opportunity to publish a set of related stories about our attitudes towards the cremated as this is such an interesting aspect of human behaviour. Back in August, during “Operation Amen” (I kid you not), Italian police arrested workers at a Tuscan crematorium who had disposed of 10-20 bodies at [...]
November 4, 2008
Spinning Spinoza
Oliver Sacks sent me his recent editorial review of an imaging study by Sam Harris and colleagues. Harris is more familiar for his attacks on religious fundamentalism in his books, “End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation,” but has resumed his graduate work in cognitive neuroscience.
The study that appeared in the Annals of Neurology is really [...]
