What is going on here? Hmmmm…the dd|a team is up to something. Are these mug shots? I wonder what it could mean.

Stay tuned……………………………………….

The Film Forum in NY is doing a retrospective of Otto Preminger’s work and I have to say that it’s a dubious enterprise. Watching The Man with the Golden Arm once again confirmed to me that his reputation of the maverick and auteur, rests very heavily on a series of poses and presumptions that his films made as being outre, modernist pieces of film art. The reality, for me, is that Preminger, with very few exceptions (like Laura), was firmly of the second rank of directors aping everyone from his fellow Germans, like Von Stroheim to William Wyler to Orson Welles.  (more…)

This is Part II of the post from Wednesday regarding UNMC’s Science Café. Part I is here. Continuing below is the other half of Dr. Singh’s six astonishing examples of recent and mind-blowing developments in our understanding of the brain and the mind.

4 – Anosognosia or “denying your weakness” is a fascinating and disturbing revelation. A patient who was paralyzed on one side of his body denied that he was paralyzed. On being asked to clap his hands, the patient proceeded to wave one hand in the air, as if clapping both together. Subsequent enquiry led the patient to affirm that he did clap and heard it too! Another accidental discovery resulted, by way of a treatment that also produces rapid eye movement. While the patient experienced rapid eye movement, he stopped denying his paralysis! As soon as the rapid eye movement ceased, he reverted to a denial of his paralysis. (more…)

Imagine the power with just a thought to close or open doors, turn lights on and off, manipulate a thermostat or move a cursor across a computer screen. Or imagine the ability to delve willfully into your own subconscious and surface those hidden secrets. Science fiction, right. Right? Wrong.

Dr. Sanjay Singh last night presented six illustrations of huge advances in neuroscience discovery at a UNMC Science Café event hosted at Slowdown. In this Part I today, I will provide a brief snapshot of three of the wonders that he had to reveal. I will post the other three in Part II on Friday.

1 – What is art? Why are we attracted to some things and not others and why is art so subjective? Can science define it? Can it be defined through neuroscience? It is early days to answer this question, but Dr. Singh suggested an ancient Sanskrit text may hold one part of the answer, because it provided a definition of art that scientists could test against. The definition was that art is the defining characteristic of an object exaggerated.

Scientists have tested this using seagulls and rats. The rat experiment gave the rats the choice of a rectangle or a square. If they went to the rectangle, they got cheese. If they went to the square, they got nothing. (more…)