Rigidness is a Symptom of Death

As Lao-tzu put it two thousand years ago: Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death he is rigid and hard. Plants when young are sinuous and moist, but when old are brittle and dry. Thus suppleness and tenderness are signs of life, While rigidity and hardness are signs of death.

 Every Brain Plays Its Own World

All knowledge, all experience could be said to be a neural situation inside the skull, and the brain is not merely a receiver and recorder of input through the senses: it also has output because the way in which it structures its senses and nerve patterns shapes the input in the same way that a harpist, by selective plucking, brings formal melody out of a row of uniformly scaled and otherwise silent strings. Thus the brain evokes the sensible world by sounding the strings of all those vibrati...

 The Scientific Method Produces General Principles by Whic...

Just as the first means by which science reduces the danger of error is the continual comparison of ideas and concepts, the second is the formulation of general principles by means of which we can understand cause-and-effect or sequential relationships among events. The function of a general principle or scientific law is twofold; to organize discrete objects and events in systematic order so that we can deal with them more effectively and exercise greater control over them; and to provide a ...

 Observation Provides Data on Problems, but Cannot Solve Them

A good illustration of the scientific method, in which observations are made for the purpose of identifying difficulties and analyzing situations, is the procedure followed by a physician when he makes a diagnosis. A doctor does not write a prescription solely on the basis of what his patient tells him; he uses instruments to take the patient’s temperature to examine his feces, and to analyze his urine. It is only after he has made these examinations that he writes his prescription; without...

 How Steroids Produce Rage in Users

I pride myself on never losing my cool I've never screamed at anyone I've never gotten physical with anyone but the ideas in my head that tell me to do things tell me to do unspeakable things like what they're unspeakable I'd have to speak them you really want to know Mum I'm also [ __ ] weird so just remember that no we bit most people uhprobably don't have this severity but I'll read a comment on social media directed at me I guess about me um and it's from like you know nameless faceless ...

 Why Humans Evolved to be Active

Humans of all to be much more physically active than our ape ancestors. Typical chimpanzee walks maybe two to three kilometers a day, and they take maybe what, three, 4,000 steps a day. A typical hunter-gatherer takes about 15 to 20,000 steps a day. Per kilo hunter-gatherers spend about twice as much energy per kilo on being physically active per day than our ape cousins. And importantly, that physical activity occurs as we age, right? So Americans are pretty inactive, as we all know. A typ...

 Digestive Enzymes Leaking into the Body May Increase Aging

In young rats, the researchers found low levels of the protein-breaking enzyme trypsin, although the tiny folds (villi) of the small intestine and the lungs contained more of this molecule. However, trypsin levels were much higher in old animals. “High densities are on sections of the intestine, liver, and lung, organs that are in the pathway of digestive enzymes leaking from the small intestine,” the paper says. Elevated levels of other digestive enzymes (elastase, lipase, and amylase) ...

 Exercise Meaningful in Having Good Mental Health

In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from 1 237 194 people aged 18 years or older in the USA from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System survey. We compared the number of days of bad self-reported mental health between individuals who exercised and those who did not, using an exact non-parametric matching procedure to balance the two groups in terms of age, race, gender, marital status, income, education l...

 Kayfabe

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. [...] The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump support...

 Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. ...