5 key insights from the new book, The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

We all lie, all the time—including you. Human deception is no different from its animal equivalent of camouflage, spots, and stripes. Charm is our very own version of frilly fins and peacock feathers. Like a stick insect adapted to hide among twigs, the effort to deceive, from camouflage to creative bullshit, is an evolutionary arms race as old as organic life.

1. You’re a natural-born liar.

Trickery is fundamental to interaction, and the instinct to misrepresent objective reality to suit our needs is fundamental to communication. In the evolution of deceit, language only came about quite recently, billions of years after more basic and more effective tools of the con. In fact, humans may have developed language specifically to manipulate each other in new and cleverer ways; it’s just the latest innovation in a billion-year-old chess game.

As Rutgers Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences Robert Trivers put it, “Our most prized possession, language, not only strengthens our ability to lie, but greatly extends its range.” Consider that when you lie with your scent, your pattern, or your petals, you can only lie about what you are, here and now. But lie with words, and you can lie about anything, anyone, anywhere; you can rewrite facts past, present, and future. In other words, human speech allows deceptions to transcend space and time. Dishonesty is truly a feature, not a bug, of our nature.

Jefferson Randolph Smith was a con man who set up the first telegraph office out of Skagway, Alaska. For the price of five dollars, settlers, frontiersmen, and prospectors could send a telegraph message to anyone in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there were lines around the building every day. It was great business—even though the first telegraph wires didn’t actually arrive in Alaska until two years later.

People lined up and paid for over a year to send important messages that went as far as the wall of Smith’s office. So why were people so ready to believe that Smith could send out telegrams just because he said so?

In the absence of evidence, humans tend to believe that whatever we’re presented with is true—be it someone’s name, a random fact, a complex explanation, even something as obvious as the presence of a physical object we see Neurologists refer to this tendency as the “honesty bias,” and it’s how we know almost everything that we know. It’s because of your honesty bias that you don’t automatically wonder if a lamp is a hallucination that only you can see, or suspect that everyone you meet might be lying about their name. If we didn’t lean toward this neurological shortcut, we’d all go insane.

It’s also the single adaptation that has allowed humans to develop speech, literacy, history, science, and civilization itself. You don’t have to discover, confirm, or even understand every fact or idea you learn, because you are biased to just accept them as true and keep climbing. This is the mechanism behind our species’ collective intelligence: To rapidly acquire another’s lifetime of experience or problem-solving for ourselves, all we need to do is ask—and then trust the answer.

So in the long run, we benefit more from the honesty bias than we risk in being overly trusting. Our honesty bias may be exploitable, but it’s also indispensable.

Seeing may be believing, but it really shouldn’t be. Your brain doesn’t actually have the processing power to deal with all of the sensory data available at every second—so, like all gamblers, it cheats. As a result, we often end up seeing what we expect to see.Take shell games; everybody falls for sleight of hand because it exploits several loopholes in perceptual cognition, the ways in which your brain processes and interprets input from your senses. In other words, if you have a normally functioning brain, you literally can’t not fall for it.

3. Lies take advantage of the way we perceive—and construct—reality.

Your visual cortex—the part of the brain that processes electrical signals from the retina and turns them into images in your mind—functions with a 0.1-second delay. So you can’t believe your eyes, because while your eyes may work, your brain is processing everything your eyes pick up about one-tenth of a second behind what’s happening.

Your brain also doesn’t have the bandwidth to process everything you see, so it fills in most of what’s around you with what it expects to be around you. It’s only when something changes radically that your brain notices, and loops back around to see what’s going on.

There are other exploitable neurological loopholes as well—for example, there’s the mirroring effect. Mirroring is when specialized cells in your brain called “mirror neurons” cause you to imitate the gesture, posture, or subtle movements of whomever you’re interacting with. Someone smiles, you smile back. Someone looks up suddenly, you look up too. You assume these are conscious choices, but they’re not—and it’s an incredibly effective way to make people look (or not look) at whatever you want.

In 1898, four Denver reporters from different newspapers went to a bar, got really drunk, and made up a story. They all claimed in their separate papers to have met a team of four American engineers on their way to China. The engineers, they said, told them that they’d been hired to destroy the Great Wall at China’s request. Supposedly this was being done as a gesture of goodwill, and as an invitation to foreign trade.

4. What matters is not if something is true, but if it is believed.

It was a multi-person hoax, and unfortunately, other newspapers picked up the story, and it went viral. Within weeks, a major east coast newspaper did an entire special Sunday spread about the fake destruction of the Great Wall, including elaborate illustrations and further exposition about the Chinese government’s historic plan to end their isolationist policy.

Because this was a respected newspaper, the story quickly spread to Europe, then to Asia, and finally to China, where political tempers were already running high. In fact, this fiction allegedly contributed to the Boxer Rebellion, a destabilizing and violent disaster that hastened the decline of the Qing Dynasty.

The point of this story is not that a single fake news story may have radically altered the course of 20th-century Chinese history—though it did—it’s that the Boxer Rebellion occurred just as it would have had the news been real. The cause may have been fictitious, but it had the same effect as its truthful parallel.

Reality, in other words, is circumstantial. In the greater scheme of things, it matters less whether or not a thing is actually true, but rather whether or not it is believed to be so.

If a whole civilization believes certain objects have power or value, and everyone behaves accordingly, then for all intents and purposes, they do possess that value or power. It may be a lie, but a quality counterfeit object still works precisely the same way the real object would—for exactly as long as it is believed to be authentic. And if a thing only needs to be believed in to be effective, then that begs the question: Was there ever anything to value or authority other than belief in the first place?

5. Nothing is entirely real.

The rule of law, the value of diamonds, the existence of the economy—when we all agree to believe certain things, those things become real. Take paper money—it’s just paper, but as long as we all agree to believe in it together, it has value. It takes on the weight of reality.

Why we lie and how we believe are so inextricably intertwined that there can be no faith without fraud, no truth without lies, no civilization without cons. Whether they’re the lies we tell each other, or the subtler and more complicated lies we tell ourselves, deceit and belief are two halves of one whole. One can’t exist without the other, and society can’t function without both.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit 

Scientist and historian Aja Raden untangles the complex relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

philosophy

Philosophy

history

History

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

Valentine’s Day is actually named for two different Roman saints, both called Valentine and both utterly unconnected to romantic love. Though legend persists that the original St. Valentine was a priest who performed illegal marriages for Emperor Claudius’ soldiers, there’s no evidence to suggest this ever happened.

Valentine's Day and Roman Saints

The first mention of St. Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday appeared in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1382. With the medieval period came a new focus on illicit but chaste courtly love, and it is here that we see some of the familiar iconographies begin to appear. Knights would give roses to their maidens and celebrate their beauty in songs from afar. But sugar was still a precious commodity in Europe, so there was no talk of exchanging candy gifts.

The First  Romantic Mention of St. Valentine’s Day

<ul><li>By the 1840s, the notion of Valentine’s Day as a holiday to celebrate romantic love had taken over most of the English-speaking world. </li><li>Into this love-crazed fray came entrepreneur Richard Cadbury (around 1868). Cadbury had recently improved its chocolate-making technique so as to extract pure cocoa butter from whole beans. This process resulted in an excess amount of cocoa butter, which Cadbury used to produce many more varieties of what was then called “eating chocolate.” </li><li>He recognized a great marketing opportunity for the new chocolates and started selling them in beautifully decorate<warningtag>d boxes that he himself designed.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>From that point, it was a quick jump to taking the familiar images of Cupids and roses and putting them on heart-shaped boxes. </warningtag></li><li><warningtag>﻿While Richard Cadbury didn’t actually patent the heart-shaped box, it’s widely believed that he was the first to produce one.</warningtag><warningtag> </warningtag></li></ul>

The First Valentine's Day Box of Chocolates

The Cadbury chocolate boxes grew increasingly elaborate until the outbreak of World War II, when sugar was rationed and Valentine’s Day celebrations were scaled down. But Victorian-era Cadbury boxes still exist, and many are treasured family heirlooms or valuable items prized by collectors.

Valentine's Day and WW2

food

Food

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

How Chocolate Became a Valentine's Day Staple

It takes strength to be good, and it takes more than courage to be powerful. You know how they say power corrupts, no it doesnt, it just exposes. Power amplifies and exposes cognitive and behavioral predispositions that already exist within us.The traits and characteristics required to excersise power are not the same ones required to gain it. Temperence is the ability to moderate our actions, thoughts and feelings, and is the virtue required to keep the lust for power under control. Allow me to dig deep into that mechanism..

Power Amplifies 

Emotional power or power excersised from the heart is directly proportional to our capacity for emotional regulation and acceptance; and rational power or power excersised from the mind is directly proportional to our capacity for applying logic and intuition.Any imbalance between mind and heart and the power expressed becomes either bias towards coercion and control or emotional manipulation. Power for the sake of power is basically the mind feeding off the heart or the heart feeding off the mind..

Emotional & Rational Power

Exercising power from a place of strength is virtue, and contrary when power is saught after to fill a void it originates from a lack or weakness. That lack is either rooted in the heart or mind, and one gain is at the expense of the other.For example, your own reasoning can utelise or feed off fear to suppress or avoid expressions of unregulated emotions, and the backlash is usually guilt or resentment. Likewise, a lack of confidence may feed off the rationale of the ego to avoid confrontations by a fake sense of control, and the backlash is usually shame or a lowered self esteem.

Strength

We need to align our behaviour and cognition to make it easier to realize our intended goals when excersing our power. Seeking power for the sake of power feeds our ego, no matter how powerful we may seem, if it originates from a lack it will need to feed on the weak and is only powerful in that said contrast.Weakness has no virtue, choosing when to excersise power takes strength, choosing how to excersise power takes courage, and choosing who to excersise power on takes humility and modesty.

Weakness

Gaining power is an endeavour, wanting it is not wrong, but in order for it to be balanced it needs to draw from feelings, emotions and imagination as much as observation, analysis and logic. It takes both control and a restrain of impulses to be able to do something powerful, in other words, most of our bad habits are due to a lack of willpower.Temperence is the ability to moderate our actions, thoughts and feelings, can you see the link?

Will Power

Power amplifies and exposes cognitive and behavioral predispositions that already exist within us.

strategy

Strategy

politics

Politics

Power As A Virtue

Democracy could be seen as a rational method to elect our leaders. However, a more cynical Girardian interpretation could be that:Elections are a ritual through which we come together to express our frustration towards the current administration. A cathartic symbolic sacrifice of old leaders, similar in spirit to the tribal sacrifices of our past.ex: In the 2020, one could say Trump lost the election more than Biden won them.

Democracy as a cathartic ritual

This idea seemed interesting enough to save it. Not sure if true. 

Starting from lecture IV, we will move away from psychology and into Girard’s history, beginning with the very first human societies. In times of internal turmoil, these early societies would converge on an innocent victim, attribute to him all the blame, murder this scapegoat in a brutal killing, and achieve peace through violent catharsis. These founding murders gave rise to institutions, cultures, and even gods themselves. Far are we from the comfort of social contracts. Girard’s unsettling conclusion is that peace is built on the corpses of innocent victims. Worldly order demands violence and deceit. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:16 The Trojan War and Reciprocal Violence 00:13:51 Oedipus and the Scapegoat Mechanism 00:15:23 Step One: Mimetic Contagion 00:25:06 Step Two: Founding Murder 00:29:22 Consensus, Deceit, and Catharsis 00:36:04 Three Marks of the Victim 00:41:18 Step Three: Divinization 00:46:30 A Revaluation of Values 00:51:26 Step Four: Institutionalization 01:03:33 The Violent Foundations of Society 01:06:39 The Hymn of Purusha 1:10:20 The Founding of Rome 1:13:10 Moral Paradigm Shifts

Starting from lecture IV, we will move away from psychology and into Girard’s history, beginning with the very first human societies. In times of internal turmoil, these early societies would converge on an innocent victim, attribute to him all the blame, murder this scapegoat in a brutal killing, and achieve peace through violent catharsis. These founding murders gave rise to institutions, cultures, and even gods themselves. Far are we from the comfort of social contracts. Girard’s unsettling conclusion is that peace is built on the corpses of innocent victims. Worldly order demands violence and deceit.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:16 The Trojan War and Reciprocal Violence
00:13:51 Oedipus and the Scapegoat Mechanism
00:15:23 Step One: Mimetic Contagion
00:25:06 Step Two: Founding Murder
00:29:22 Consensus, Deceit, and Catharsis
00:36:04 Three Marks of the Victim
00:41:18 Step Three: Divinization
00:46:30 A Revaluation of Values
00:51:26 Step Four: Institutionalization
01:03:33 The Violent Foundations of Society
01:06:39 The Hymn of Purusha
1:10:20 The Founding of Rome
1:13:10 Moral Paradigm Shifts

If I were not Diogenes, I wish I were Alexander.

Johnathan at Limbo

Lecture IV: The Scapegoat Mechanism | René Girard's Mimetic Theory

René Girard's Mimetic Theory - Lecture 3&4

..tell me the difference between tragedy and comedy.(...)A trick. There's no difference. It's a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.

Lotto laughed with the others, not because he was a punch line, but because he was grateful to Denton Thrasher for revealing theater to him. The one way, Lotto had finally found, that he could live in this world.

Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.

I hated my violin as a boy until my father made me compose a score as a match was happening on the telly. Tottenham, Manchester, our boys losing. And suddenly, as I was playing, everything that I had felt so deeply without music deepened even more. The dread, the joy. And that was it for me, re-creating that moment was all I wanted to do. I called the composition Audere Est Facere. He laughed.

Lobes of warmth, of cold, always the dazzle. He thrashed away, feeling a good tiredness come over him. He swam until his arms burned and his lungs were salted, and he swam some more.

She, at some point, had stopped loving him. (He couldn't know.) It was the sorrow of his life. But perhaps, right then she did.

She forgot meals, ate dinners of tuna still in the can, spent too much time streaming films in bed. Time clicked by. The days grew colder, darker. Some days she never turned on the light, waking at eight when the sun rose weakly, sleeping at four-thirty when it bled itself out. She felt ursine. Norwegian.

When he came in, it was only minutes after her, but she'd smelled the winter in his hair when he leaned his head against her neck. She held his head gently, feeling his secret happiness moving in him.

Or this: every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black. Almost unremarked upon, this kindness. He would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she'd feel something rising in her through her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.

Was getting a bit bored with this story of a marriage until I got to the middle of it and everything changed. Lives are made of daily details and well kept secrets. Loved it in the end.  ❤︎

Fates and Furies: A Novel [Groff, Lauren] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Fates and Furies: A Novel

Scenes from a Marriage

<ol><li> Only city without citadel in entire IVC.</li><li> Chanhu-daro is an archaeological site of the great Indus Valley Civilization near the banks of the legendary river Sarasvati.</li><li>The settlement was established somewhere between 4000 BCE and 1700 BCE, and is considered to have been a Centre for assembling carnelian globules or bead-making manufacturing industry.</li><li>This site is a gathering of three low hills that were once a part of a solitary settlement, nearly 5 hectares in size.</li></ol>

Quick Facts About Chanhu- daro (1)

<ol><li>At "Chanhu-daro", baked bricks were widely used to construct houses. Several buildings have been classified as workshops or industrial areas, and some of Chanhu-daro’s structures may have served as warehouses.</li><li>Sesame (seed) which was indigenous to South Africa has been found in Chanhu-daro and other Harappan sites. It was likely grown for oil at these sites. Additionally, Chanhu-daro grows peas.</li></ol>

Quick Facts About Chanhu- daro (2)

"Chanhudaro" was first uncovered by N. G. Majumdar (Nani Gopal Majumdar)  in March 1931, and again during the winter field meeting of 1935-36 by the American School of Indic and Iranian Studies and the Museum of Fine Arts."About N.G. Majumdar: Nani Gopal Majumdar was an Indian archaeologist who is credited with having discovered 62 Indus Valley Civilization sites in Sindh including Chanhudaro".

1. Who discovered Chanhu-daro civilization?

Archaeologists assume regarding the Harappans’ potential usage of cinnabar after finding traces of the mercury ore in the IVC sites, which is also used to produce lipstick, sindoor, & other products & discovered something they believe to be lipsticks at Chanhu-daro."Additionally, figures from the Nausharo archaeological site in modern-day Pakistan that date from 2800 to 2600 BCE had red pigment traces in the section of their hair that resembles the sindoor worn by married women in India today".

2. Was Lipstick Found In Chanhu-daro?

<ol><li>Apart from Lipstick & sindoor other important findings & excavations were a comb made of Ivory, mirrors made up of copper and bronze, axes, vessels, spears, razors, tools, dishes, etc.</li><li>There were plates and bowls, terracotta wagon models, and a miniature terracotta bird that can whistle when blown.</li><li>Male spear thrower or dancer—a damaged figure of great significance (4.1cm) that was discovered at "Chanhudaro" & is currently on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA.</li></ol>

3. Other Important Things Found at Chanhu-daro:

<ol><li>"Chanhudaro" produced metalwork, beads made of various materials, steatite seals, & shell bangles.</li><li>Chanhudaro, Harappa, & Rakhigarhi all include evidence of cotton textile remnants that have been preserved on silver or copper artifacts.</li><li>The discovery of iron objects in Chanhudaro, Ahar, Rajasthan (India), & Mundigak is significant because it supports the theory that South Asia manufactured iron throughout the third millennium.</li></ol>

4. Other Important Things Found at Chanhu-daro (2)

"Chanhudaro" known as the Lancashire of India because Lancashire literally means a mild white cheese with a crumbly texture. Mumbai is called the 'Lancashire of India'.

5. Why is Chanhu-daro called Lancashire of India?

The "Chanhu-daro" site is located in Sindh, Pakistan, south of Mohenjo-daro. Between 4000 and 1700 BCE, the settlement was occupied. The city of Chanhu-daro is the only Harappan city without a defensive castle

6. Is Chanhu-daro a Harappan site?

"Chanhu-daro" is a Harappan site. It is a tiny settlement (less than 7 hectares) as compared to other Harappan sites such as Mohenjodaro (125 hectares). The site is almost exclusively devoted to craft production, including bead-making, shell-cutting, metal-working, seal-making and weight-making

7. Why is Chanhudaro famous?

Chanhu-daro was exclusively devoted to craft production, including bead-making, shell-cutting, metal-working, seal-making, and weight-making

8. What crafts did Chanhu-daro produce?

At "Chanhu-daro", evidence of shell craftsmanship was discovered, and bangles and ladles were created. Harappan seals were typically created in larger towns such as Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, & Chanhudaro, which were part of the administrative network.

9. What is found in Chanhu-daro

"Chanhu-daro" (Sindh, Pakistan) was a city without a citadel in the Indus Valley Civilization.

10. Does Chanhu-daro have citadel?

"Lancashire" in Britain was the first place where spinning and weaving of cotton into fabric began and it was the hub of cotton and textile mills . This place was responsible for half of the world's cotton production

11. Why Lancashire is famous

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Reading & Writing

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Learning & Education

IVC Part - 7 (Chanhudaro)

Like all traditional festivals in China, Chinese New Year is steeped with stories and myths. One of the most popular is about the mythical beast Nian (/nyen/), who ate livestock, crops, and even people on the eve of a new year. (It's interesting that Nian, the 'yearly beast', sounds the same as 'year' in Chinese.) To prevent Nian from attacking people and causing destruction, people put food at their doors for Nian. It's said that a wise old man figured out that Nian was scared of loud noises (firecrackers) and the color red. Then, people put <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/culture/lanterns.htm">red lanterns </a>and red scrolls on their windows and doors to stop Nian from coming inside, and crackled bamboo (later replaced by firecrackers) to scare Nian away. The monster Nian never showed up again. Click to learn <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/festivals/chinese-new-year-legends.htm">more legends about the Chinese New Year </a>.

A Legend of the Origin of Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year has enjoyed a history of about 3,500 years. Its exact beginning is not recorded. Some people believe that Chinese New Year originated in <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/china-history/the-shang-dynasty.htm">the Shang Dynasty </a>(1600–1046 BC), when people held sacrificial ceremonies in honor of gods and ancestors at the beginning or the end of each year.

Chinese New Year's Origin: In the Shang Dynasty

The date of the festival, the first day of the first month in the Chinese lunar calendar, was fixed in <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/china-history/the-han-dynasty.htm">the Han Dynasty </a>(202 BC – 220 AD). Certain celebration activities became popular, such as burning bamboo to make a loud cracking sound.

Chinese New Year Date Was Fixed: In the Han Dynasty

In the Wei and Jin dynasties (220–420), apart from worshiping gods and ancestors, people began to entertain themselves. The customs of a family getting together to clean their house, having dinner, and staying up late on <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/festivals/chinese-new-year-eve.htm">New Year’s Eve </a>originated among common people.

In the Wei and Jin Dynasties

The prosperity of economies and cultures during the <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/china-history/the-tang-dynasty.htm">Tang </a>, <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/china-history/the-song-dynasty.htm">Song </a>, and <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/china-history/the-qing-dynasty.htm">Qing </a>dynasties accelerated the development of the Spring Festival. The customs during the festival became similar to those of modern times. Setting off firecrackers, visiting relatives and friends, and eating dumplings became important parts of the celebration. More entertaining activities arose , such as watching <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/special-report/chinese-new-year/new-year-dragon-dance.htm">dragon </a>and <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/special-report/chinese-new-year/new-year-lion-dance.htm">lion dances </a>during the Temple Fair and enjoying lantern shows. The function of the Spring Festival changed from a religious one to entertaining and social ones, more like that of today.

More Chinese New Year Activities: From the Tang to Qing Dynasties

In 1912, the government decided to abolish Chinese New Year and the lunar calendar, but adopted the Gregorian calendar instead and made January 1 the official start of the new year. After 1949, Chinese New Year was renamed to <a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/festivals/chinese-new-year-spring-festival.htm">the Spring Festival </a>. It was listed as a nationwide public holiday.

In Modern Times

Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival, is the most important among the traditional Chinese festivals. Here is a short history of it.

The history of Chinese New Year can be traced back to about 3,500 years ago. Do you know when the date of the festival was fixed and how the ancient people celebrate this festival?

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Religion & Spirituality

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Travel

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The Origin and History of Chinese New Year: When Start and Why

In work he performed in 1896, the American zoologist Frederick Kenyon showed that the brain of the tiny bee was infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined, with thousands upon thousands of connection points, and also showed, for the first time in any organism, that neurons fell into clearly identifi­able classes. He died, forgotten, in a lunatic asylum.

Frederick Kenyon

“American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867–1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world’s foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, ‘a supernova.’ Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also high­lighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifi­able classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain.

The Inner Workings of the Bee Brain

One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies — the part of the neuron that con­tains the chromosomes and the DNA — decoding machinery — are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mush­room’s ‘head’), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces.

The Kenyon Cells

A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched struc­ture that is a nerve cell’s signal ‘receiver’) extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron’s ‘information-sending output cable’) extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom’s ‘stalk’).Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neu­rons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus.

Shaped Cells

(In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the an­tennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) — and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration.Kenyon’s 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected.

A Marvel

Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as full­grown trees — only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain’s ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee’s brain — and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the informa­tion flow through the brain by learning and memory.

A Billion Synapses

It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon’s, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information pro­cessing inside a brain.Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplish­ments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved be­tween institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship.

Financial Hardship

Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for ‘erratic and threatening behavior’ toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later — as Nick Strausfeld writes, ‘unloved, forgotten, and alone.’It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.”

"Unloved, Forgotten, and Alone"

In work he performed in 1896, the American zoologist Frederick Kenyon showed that the brain of the tiny bee was infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined, with thousands upon thousands of…

creativity

Creativity

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

In the quest to understand the bee brain …

Harry was around 20 when he heard a joke his father, Charles, had made to his mother, Diana, during his birth. “Wonderful. You have given me an heir and a spare. You have done your job,” said Charles before going “off to meet with his girlfriend.”He writes that he was “a shadow, a Plan B” and nothing more to his older brother and Crown Prince, William. The whole book seems to be his response to a lifetime of being made to feel expendable and unimportant:“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he writes bluntly. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversi<warningtag>on, and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.”</warningtag><warningtag> </warningtag>

The “heir” and the “spare” 

<ul><li>Harry describes his father breaking the news to him while he sat on his bed at Balmoral Castle. Charles, who at the best of times was not good at “expressing his emotions,” did not hug him at the moment. He put a hand on his knee and said: It’s going to be OK.</li><li>He has tried to get closure from the incident, but unfortunately, failed to do so - replicating Diana’s last car journey only left Harry “questioning the official cause of her death.” </li><li>Harry and William wanted a thorough investigation into the matter but were dissuaded by “those who decided”.</li><li>Harry describes how his sorrow over his mothe<warningtag>r’s death led him to a woman who “claimed to have powers.” He attempted to speak to his late mother various times through this medium.</warningtag></li></ul>

The trauma of losing a mother

<ul><li>Harry refers to William as "my beloved brother, my arch-nemesis".</li><li>He writes that he was desperate for William's company after their mother Diana died but that his brother disowned him when Harry started at the same senior school, Eton College.</li><li>William didn’t want Harry to be the best man at his wedding.</li><li>Harry says William attacked him and knocked him onto the floor during an argument over Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.</li><li>Harry claims William and Kate Middleton encouraged him to wear a Nazi costume at a party when he was 20.</li><li>Prince William and Harry fought about their royal role in Africa (with Willi<warningtag>am claiming prior ownership over royal/charitable activities on the continent.)</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Harry had to ask the Queen’s permission to keep a beard for his wedding day—and then he and Prince William had an argument, which ended in Wills ordering Harry to shave off his beard (because he wasn't allowed to keep his at this wedding with Kate).</warningtag></li></ul>

The relationship with William

<ul><li>Just like the loss of their mother was a matter that brought the two siblings together, so was their father’s decision to marry Camilla. The brothers said they would not stand in the way of Charles' relationship with her, but asked that they not marry.</li><li>Harry and William begged their father not to marry Camilla. William felt “tremendous guilt” over “the other woman” whom he had “long harbored suspicions about".</li><li>The two did not ultimately stand in the way of his father and Camilla’s relationship, despite Harry wondering on more occasions than one if the now Queen Consort was like the “wicked st<warningtag>epmother” from fairytales.</warningtag></li></ul>

Begging Charles not to marry Camilla

Harry admits to taking cocaine at age 17. He writes: “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time. At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I’d been offered a line, and I’d done a few more since...it wasn’t much fun..it didn't make me particularly happy as it seemed to make everyone around me."Harry also used psychedelics as part of his therapy to treat his post-traumatic stress after the war.

Drug use

According to the book, Charles and sometimes Camilla approved damaging press leaks about Harry and William.On one occasion, Charles cooperated with the tabloids on a story about Harry and drugs to bolster his own faltering reputation. “No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”The pattern is: Charles and Camilla continually prioritize their own rehabilitation narrative over the reputations of their children, and justify the practice because they are the ones closest to the throne.

Tabloid scandals and press leaks from his family 

After he’s married, he imagined, he won’t be afraid to go out in public, because his family will start to respect him. He thought he’ll get his beloved brother back because he and William and Kate and whoever he marries will get to be couple friends together. And he’ll have, at long last, a partner, someone to replace the source of unconditional love he lost when his mother died.Instead, when Harry marries, Charles tells him that he can’t afford to support both him and the Cambridges. William repeats tabloid stories about Meghan being pushy and abrasive, while Kate flinches away from Meghan’s <warningtag>American friendliness. And Meghan is so badly harassed by racist tabloids that she begins to struggle with suicidal ideation.</warningtag>

Marriage with Meghan 

Harry really, really hates the press, blaming them for chasing his mother so relentlessly, including in the events leading to her death in Paris, with Harry returning obsessively to the scene of the car accident.He also reads their coverage obsessively, to the point that absorbing press coverage of the royal family seems to be his main hobby. He has nicknames for his least favorite journalists and follows the minutia of their careers with interest.

Hating the press

Harry left because of constant harassment from the press.He says: “My problem has never been with the monarchy, not the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”Harry’s decision to leave the Royal Family was thus born out of years of trauma that he had endured as well as the treatment his wife, Meghan, received. Scared of seeing history repeat itself (drawing parallels to <warningtag>his late mother), Harry decided to break away from the family.</warningtag>

Leaving the Royal Family

<ul><li>It was his father Charles who first called him to say that the Queen’s health “had taken a turn.”</li><li>Harry recounts immediately then sending a text message to William to ask if he and Kate were flying to Balmoral – and when and how. There was no response from William.</li><li>Harry then received another call from Charles, who told Harry that he was welcome at the Scottish residence but that his wife, Meghan, was not.</li><li>Harry says he spent much of the time on his flight to Scotland staring at the clouds, replaying the last time he’d spoken with his grandmother, 4 days prior. </li></ul>

Goodbye to the Queen

Soon to be a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak—and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller Booksense Pick Borders New Voices Finalist Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award

books

Books

Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak—and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller Booksense Pick Borders New Voices Finalist Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award

J. R. Moehringer

The Tender Bar

Spare - Prince Harry

He published his for essential paper all in his one miracle year of 1905.He was 'meh' at poetry or violin playing. He refused the job of being the Israel's president (he didn't quite fit the job profile now, did he, with all that wild hair). :))

Was Einstein really all that smart?

Words cam with difficulty to him, but images came easier.He wasn’t mathematically brilliant, but could pull his weight. He was different. He had a clear way of thinking that wouldn’t register on an intelligence test. His first paper on special theory of relativity  can be understood by ordinary mortals: no jargon, just simple ideas, inescapable logic. Just brilliant in its simplicity.

Einstein was a bit of a weirdo.

He ran little experiments. At age 16 he wondered about riding alongside a ray of light. What does light look light for a moving observer? Light would always look like it was moving at the same speed. Other's were thinking about this also, but his thoughts were more visual.When thinking about theory of gravity, he imagined riding a falling elevator. He was also extremely stubborn. He didn't trust experiments not confirming his ideas. Trusting his instincts was mostly correct.

Einstein's way of thinking

Einstein seems like this larger than life figure, but his weirdness makes him likeable. Makes him more human and approachable.

How did a man who had been working as a patent clerk publish four groundbreaking papers about space, time, atoms and the strange nature of light -- all in one year? A look at Albert Einstein's unique intelligence. 

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How Smart Was Einstein?

Find 100+ fun History Facts - European, American, Black, Asian across various periods - Curated by our community from books, articles or documentaries

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

How Chocolate Became a Valentine's Day Staple

Power As A Virtue

René Girard's Mimetic Theory - Lecture 3&4

Scenes from a Marriage

IVC Part - 7 (Chanhudaro)

The Origin and History of Chinese New Year: When Start and Why

In the quest to understand the bee brain …

Spare - Prince Harry

How Smart Was Einstein?

It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.