Peter Whybrow

Cultural shifts in perceptions about the human body and brain, how the brain reacts to scarcity, abundance and social situations, and how modern Western society and market economics are straining our body’s limits and making us sick physically and mentally.

Creative Genius: We Feel Fine

FORA.tv now features searchable video! A genuinely revolutionary technical achievement. A full-text searchable transcript is synchronized to the video, and sentences are highlighted as it plays. Click on any word in the transcript to move to that part of the video. FORA.tv has always had the best custom video player online and this takes it light years beyond their competition. Oh yeah: this lecture is about We Feel Fine, a digital art site fed by emotions expressed in blogs, and another art project about a whaling trip that I’m vague about now because I’m too excited about searchable video and synched transcripts. Epic! Go see! (To find other synched videos on their site, try searching for the phrase “jump to that point.” They will be easier to find soon, it’s work in progress.)

The Baroness, Consciousness, and the Twitterverse: A Conversation with Susan Greenfield

Greenfield recommends pub debates or rants on street corners instead of using social media. Quote: “How sad that a species that previously wrote novels and expressed themselves in thousand word letters, are now having to encapsulate important or interesting ideas in 150 [sic] characters, and that’s the first issue. And if you are used to doing that, are you going to start living your life in windows of 150 characters? And I do find that rather sad. Secondly, there’s many ways in which you can have debates and discussions. You can go to the pub, you can go out to the street, you know, you can go to universities, you can come to the Royal Institution in London. There’s many, many places and ways in which you can discuss ideas… to say that this is the only vehicle for debate and discussion for people who are ordinary human beings who aren’t in positions of power, who don’t have the platforms politicians have, I find that a bit disingenuous.” Then we’re told how one becomes a Baroness in the House of Lords. Greenfield admits she’s never used Twitter, but characterizes users as threatened and angry with a “shaky sense of identity” similar to small children demanding attention, and “perhaps they’re going nowhere.” Ironically, she is keen on the Royal Institution of Great Britain producing webcasts for the “globalization, not just democratization of science.” While their talks look interesting, the Royal Institution demands your street address and other personal data to register to watch, so I won’t. Ah, culture clashes.