Beyond pure research, body swap illusions might put us in someone else’s shoes to increase our empathy towards them. Or they might be a useful therapy. An interesting finding of the invisibility illusion study was that participants were less socially anxious standing in front of an audience when under the illusion. More broadly, however, the …
Virtual Body Swap Experiment Maps Out-of-Body Illusion in the Brain Read More »
The following is an excerpt from Freud: Great Thinkers on Modern Life, a new series published by The School of Life. In this particular chapter, author Bret Kahr uses Freud’s writings to make a case for the value and effective methods of forgetting the past. As a psychotherapist, I spend a great deal of my …
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.” “Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What …
From Johann Hari Author of ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs’ As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and …
from Beyond the argument that faith in God is irrational—and therefore illegitimate by EMMA GREEN: In America, which sociologists often describe as a uniquely religious country compared with the rest of the Western world, a vast majority of people have faith. According to Pew, 86 percent of Millennials, or people aged 18-33, say they believe in …
The False Equation of Atheism and Intellectual Sophistication Read More »
I recently watched the film De-Lovely, a 2004 musical biopic of Cole Porter, from his first meeting with Linda Lee Thomas until his death. The Cole Porter songs throughout are a delight in themselves, and, because of the story, the ambiguity of many of the lyrics becomes clearer. What I found most fascinating, from a …