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I promised God, as you recall, in the hospital where I lay nearly dying, that, if I was allowed to live, I would write the things which I most feared to write. snip Ever since I was first conscious, I was aware that I perceived some things differently than did many of those around me. In kindergarten, I realized (without, of course, having the word for this) that I had synesthesia — the condition in which one sense spills over into another; people with this form of perception hear colors, or taste sound, or in other ways activate different senses...

It might be the best-studied of all our senses, but surprises about the way our vision works just keep on coming. Recent research has startling and also salutary lessons about how we see. Your brain makes up a lot of what you “see” Whether you’re walking around or sitting at a desk, you no doubt feel that you can see pretty clearly all around you. Yes, so you might be looking ahead as you walk through a park, say, but you can see a rich world of grass, trees and people to either side of you. Well, you might be...

Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz said on Tuesday that President Trump's rhetoric on race is partly to blame for the country's "racial divide." Schultz said he believes the president has given people license to copy the "behavior and language that comes out of this administration," in an interview with CNN Tuesday. "Having said that, the racial divide and the inequities that exist between people of color and caucasians in America is a problem that's existed for quite some time and I think — we have to ask ourselves a very important question and that is, what kind of country do...

The recent firing of Mike Flynn is par for the course of any new administration. When a new POTUS comes into office, he must evaluate the performance of his subordinates. Even more difficult is the fact that POTUS must insist that their performance and integrity [whatever that might mean] meets the standards that POTUS has set for himself and his WH. Lt.Gen. Mike Flynn has been a loyal soldier. He did what he was supposed to do in order to facilitate Trump’s ascendancy into the WH. However, rumors were floating around that the National Security team in the WH was...

“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind Last week began with an obsession over the McKinney Texas pool controversy. Lets start this week with a peripheral story: when high school principal Alberto Iber made an impolitic comment on a Miami Herald online story, public outrage and redress was swift and severe;...

Time has always perplexed the human race. We’ve tried to define it, track it, and measure it since the emergence of civilization. However, facts like these listed here show us how distorted our perception of time can be and how much we still need to learn about the fourth dimension.

Seventy-four percent of Americans think teachers make less than they really do, according to a new poll from Rasmussen. The average teacher salary in America is $55,000 (upward of $75,000 in Chicago), but three quarters of Americans think teachers earn less than that. Over half of Americans (52 percent) believe teachers are paid too little. Just 15 percent believe they are paid too much while 26 percent think teachers are paid the right amount. In a related poll, just 26 percent of Americans give public schools positive marks.

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Brains of high-IQ people automatically ignore the least relevant sights People with high IQs see the world in their own way. Their brains seamlessly separate the visual wheat from the chaff, allowing them to home in on the most relevant information, a new study finds. Using a simple visual exercise, a team led by psychologist Duje Tadin of the University of Rochester in New York found that high-IQ volunteers excelled at detecting the direction in which small objects moved but struggled at tracking large moving objects. That’s a useful trait, the scientists report May 23 in Current Biology. In many...

Surprise! Your Skin Can Hear Jeanna Bryner Senior Writer LiveScience.com Wed Nov 25, 1:06 pm ET We not only hear with our ears, but also through our skin, according to a new study. The finding, based on experiments in which participants listened to certain syllables while puffs of air hit their skin, suggests our brains take in and integrate information from various senses to build a picture of our surroundings. Along with other recent work, the research flips the traditional view of how we perceive the world on its head. "[That's] very different from the more traditional ideas, based on...

This piece of portable artwork represents the fact that Obama has a narcissistic perception problem with reality. He thinks he's the greatest communist thing since sliced capitalist on a saber. He doesn't know why most people are against his quest for socialist-style health care. He's awesome, he's charming, he's unstoppable. His charisma points are way up there. Problem is, most people are seeing him for what he is. He's a big-time socialist. He's running up never-before imagined trillion dollar deficits without even blinking. Printing money like water with nothing backing it. He thinks we all see him as a Jedi...

<p>Shortly after the Group of 20 summit concluded in London in April, Nicolas Sarkozy blurted out to a small group of advisers a question that weighed on him as he watched President Obama glad-hand his way through the gathering: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?) Sarkozy did not answer his own blunt query...</p>

First Star Trek predicted the normalization of racial diversity. Then it was cell phones. Now it’s a “theory of everything.” Is there anything Star Trek can’t predict? In an episode called “Shore Leave,” first broadcast in 1966, Kirk and Spock visited a planet where any thought — even an idyll one — would cause its physical creation. So whenever somebody had a dangerous idea — of a hungry tiger, for instance — an advanced computer acted instantly to manifest the thought into a physical reality. Trouble was, the crew of the Enterprise were not aware that they needed to control...

Of Fingers and Dikes BY BRIAN PRETTI | may 1, 2009 The concept of perception versus reality is an extremely important distinction in the current economic cycle and circumstances of the moment. And remember, it’s not that potential misperceptions being priced into financial assets at any point in time are somehow bad, but rather THE issue of importance is making sure we are in touch with factual reality at all points in time so that we hope to make a judgment about whether what markets are discounting is correct or otherwise. Trying to make an informed judgment about this distinction...

The influence of culture and environment can have an effect on our visual perception. This theory was first explored by Robert Laws, a Scottish missionary working in Malawi, Africa, during the late 1800's. Take a look at the picture below. What you see will largely depend on where you live in the world. After you have examined the picture, scroll down for a more detailed explanation. So What Did You See? What is above the woman's head? When scientists showed a similar sketch to people from East Africa, nearly all the participants in the experiment said she was balancing a...

London, Nov 15 (ANI): Religious people really do see the world differently, that's what a new research ahs suggested. The study found that Dutch Calvinists notice embedded visual patterns quicker than their atheist compatriots. According to Bernhard Hommel, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the new study, culture has long been known to distort visual perception. In a bid to see if religious differences skew perception, Hommel's team tested 40 Dutch atheist and Calvinist university students, who, religion aside, had similar cultural backgrounds. In the study, Hommel's team showed participants a large triangle or square made...

Senator Obama, you stand accused of being an out-of-touch, arugula-eating Ivy League elitist who couldn't convert a one-pin spare if the presidency depended on it. I don't have a dog in this fight (despite what Hillary Clinton supporters sometimes think of me) but here are my suggestions for how to reach, and be seen reaching, the "the real America" as you continue to grind toward the Democratic nomination. Obviously, you've got to talk in more meat-and-potatoes terms about how your economic proposals will help working people. But that's only part of what you need to do: TELL US IN CONCRETE...

Perception The Validity of Perceptual Evidence by Reginald Firehammer Knowledge begins with consciousness. I do not mean that consciousness is itself knowledge, but that if we are to know anything we must first be conscious of it. It is not enough just to be conscious, however, if it is to be capable of providing us knowledge. If what we are conscious of is not totally reliable and valid, no certain knowledge is possible. The validity of human consciousness, called perception, has been under continual assault throughout the history of philosophy. The first concerted assault is Plato's assertion that our consciousness...

Sacramento -- Newport Beach (Orange County) Councilman Richard Nichols won't be among those cheering when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger takes the stage this weekend at the state Republican Convention in Los Angeles. Like a lot of conservative voters, the 66-year-old Nichols said he's disillusioned with the governor's recent efforts to recast himself as a political moderate in order to curry favor among Democrats and independent voters. Schwarzenegger's new strategy, which has boosted him in the polls, has also attracted criticism from both ends of the political spectrum that the governor has reversed position on key issues -- like education spending, the...

LONDON (AP) - Bangladesh and Chad were ranked most corrupt on a global watchdog group's annual list of corruption levels in 159 nations, released Tuesday. At the other end of the scale, Iceland was ranked least corrupt. Corruption undermines efforts to eradicate poverty, with graft by public officials hampering attempts to raise the living standards of the poor, Transparency International said. "Corruption must be vigorously addressed if aid is to make a real difference in freeing people from poverty," said Peter Eigen, chairman of the Berlin-based group. To form its annual corruption index, Transparency International asked businessmen, academics and public...