zen, the right brain and existence

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk made me think about meditation and the functioning of the brain.

Here’s an excerpt about the talk posted on TED.com

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

What I got out of the talk is that once we have the ability to think selectively from the right side of the brain, we enter a sort of zen mode of existence. Which makes me think about the mode that we (or people who can) get into when they’re meditating. Even more fascinating is the possibility of switching from the right to the left at will, and being able to co-relate the individuality aspects (left brain) with the connectedness and universality aspects (right brain) in day to day life.

Fascinating stuff. This probably adds more to brain research and our place in existence than all the mind/brain research done in the last hundred years.

The content on TED is amazing. Chris Anderson (of Wired and long tail fame) has done a tremendous job of ensuring that the content is available for everyone to view. Contrary to what I’ve heard from some folks, I don’t believe TED is elitist at all.

why i read boing boing

This is awesome entertainment…

The “religious people praying for the bull to rise” bit ..

boing boing reporting on people praying to the bull

blogging is dead

Blogging is dead. Long live twitter/fbook/flickr/microblogging.

A search on google returns 18 million hits.

Get your ranting/15 minutes of fame/self publishing fix somewhere else. Every social site has some form of expression/microblogging features.

But I keep trying…

why i read jwz

I love this guy…

Dear Diary, tonight I saw a shirtless man run down the middle of the street. Being chased by another shirtless man. Whose pants were falling down. Because he had just taken off his belt. Which he then began using to beat the first man.

Good times.

http://jwz.livejournal.com/924938.html

beauty is skin deep

This confirms my suspicion that we’re all very shallow. As in skin deep.
Here’s an analysis/attempt to algorithmize how we perceive physical beauty in our fellow human beings.

It’s based on a statistical analysis of what humans perceive to be beautiful.

When human raters are presented with a collection of shapes and asked to rank them according to their aesthetic appeal, the results often indicate that there is a statistical consensus among the raters. Yet it might be difficult to define a succinct set of rules that capture the aesthetic preferences of the raters. In this work, we explore a data-driven approach to aesthetic enhancement of such shapes. Specifically, we focus on the challenging problem of enhancing the aesthetic appeal (or the attractiveness) of human faces in frontal photographs (portraits), while maintaining close similarity with the original.