1983. American physiologist Benjamin Libet invited some people to participate in his experiment. It was an experiment that would spark interest in psychologists, philosophers, and even neuroscientists.

The study itself was simple. Participants were connected to an apparatus that measured their brain and muscle activity, and were asked to do two basic things. First, they had to flex their wrist whenever they felt like doing so.

Second, they had to note the time when they first became aware of their intention to flex their wrist. They did this by remembering the position of a revolving dot on a clock face. The brain activity Libet was interested in was the “readiness potential”, which is known to ramp up before movements are executed.

It wasn’t the experiment that was controversial. Rather, it was the findings. Through his experiment, Libet found out that the “participants’ brains had already “decided” to move, half a second before they felt consciously aware of it.” This seems to support the argument that there is no self that is distinct from the brain. In other words, there might be no such thing such as “free will”.

But is that really the case?

Know more about this controversial study over at The Conversation.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: waldryano/ Pixabay)

For a person who is not used to lying, the said activity could be very stressful for him. When he lies, his respiratory and heart rate will increase. But why is this the case?

Lying generally involves more effort than telling the truth, and because of this, it involves the prefrontal cortex. A 2001 study by late neuroscientist Sean Spence (University of Sheffield in England) explored fMRI images of the brain while lying.

This is what the polygraph, more commonly known as the “lie detector”, is used for — to provide continuous readings of a person’s blood pressure and respiration rate, elements in one’s body which could indicate if that person is lying or not.

But can someone outsmart the polygraph? The answer is yes.

… for example, psychopaths, who lack empathy… do not exhibit the typical physiological stress responses when telling a lie.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should deem the polygraph as something unreliable.

According to the American Polygraph Association (made up largely of polygraph examiners), the estimated accuracy of a polygraph can be up to 87 percent. That means that in 87 out of 100 cases, the polygraph will be able to detect if someone is telling the truth.

Learn more about the polygraph, as well as what happens to a person when he lies, over at Big Think.

(Image Credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation/ Wikimedia Commons)

Presenting: a new Homestar Runner cartoon! Sadly, this will be the only one this year. In this Halloween special, familiar characters solve a Scooby-Doo-esque mystery -with no dog, which highlights how superfluous the dog was. Then they show off their Halloween costumes. Longtime fans will catch all kinds of self-references, while everyone else can just enjoy the chaos. -via Metafilter

This cat just wanted a tasty treat while it’s outside! Well, its owner tried their best helping, sure, by tapping the ice where the desired fish was trapped. Watch the short video of a cat trying to get a carp out of the ice. I’m sure it wasn’t able to get the carp. Hopefully its owner gave it a treat when they got home! 

Israeli artist Michal Levy, who has synesthesia,  created a short animation set to different classical pieces, such as Bach’s ‘Prelude in C Major’, and Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps.’ Levy saw the “rollicking notes” of Coltrane’s Giant Steps as a “kinetic, cascading cityscape built from colourful blocks of sound” and was able to visualize it. Levy then created the short animation ‘Dance of Harmony’ to show what she sees when she hears  Bach’s ‘Prelude in C Major,’ as Open Culture details: 

During a maternity leave, working with her friend, animator Hagai Azaz, she set herself the challenge of showing, as she describes it, “the cascading flow of emotion, to make the feeling contagious, by using only color, the basic shape of circles, and minimalist motion, assigning to each musical chord the visual elements that correspond to it synaesthetically.”

It is fascinating to compare Levy’s descriptions of her condition with those of other famous synesthetes like Vladimir Nabokov and, especially Kandinsky, who in essence first showed the world what music looks like, thereby giving art a new visual language. Levy calls her synesthesia art, an “emotional voyage of harmony,” and includes in her visualization of Bach’s famous prelude an “unexpected elegiac sidebar of love and loss,” Maria Popova writes. Read Levy’s full description of Dance of Harmony here and learn more about the “extraordinary sensory condition called synesthesia” here.

Image via Open Culture 

The Windsor Ruins, located in the tiny town of Port Gibson, Mississippi, is one of the most sought after sites, frequented by locals and tourists. The site, which consists of just twenty-three Corinthian columns, is believed to be haunted by the ghost of a Union soldier who was killed on the property, as Only In Your State details: 

Smith Coffee Daniell II, Windsor’s owner, is also said to haunt the grounds. According to one report, a visitor saw a man in period clothing, assumed it was a re-enactor, and approached to ask some questions about Windsor. However, as he got close, the “re-enactor” turned toward the man, smiled, and faded away.

The strange happenings don’t end there, though. It’s said that on some nights, sounds of a long-ago party can be heard.

Image via Only In Your State 

Among the Akan people of West Africa, rules passed down from generation to generation show how to be respectful of the earth itself. One rule is that you do not go into the forest on Thursday. No hunting and no farming, because Thursday is a sacred day for the gods to find solitude. That day of rest is enforced by a deity called sasabonsam, a fierce being with glowing eyes and terrifying teeth who will destroy those who flout the rule, or maybe send them back traumatized and damaged as a warning to others.   

It is said that a sasabonsam immediately begins tracking a farmer or hunter who dares to venture into the forest on a Thursday. It’s been reported that the creature plays with its victims like a cat might play with a mouse, stalking prey as if by instinct, even when they’re not hungry. It might jump from tree to tree, or tap a victim’s shoulder with its tail. Once the sasabonsam has had its fill of taunting, it will stretch down to the forest floor to snatch up its prey, biting its neck, draining its blood, and gorging on its flesh and bone.

“These stories and legends [of the sasabonsam] are used to educate and socialize people,” Nrenzah says, something she has honored in her own life. “The same stories I heard as a kid are the same stories I tell my children.” They are cautionary tales carrying moral lessons about the necessity to respect the land.

The legend of sasabonsam has gone through some changes, particularly when Christian missionaries needed an understandable stand-in for the devil. Read about sasabonsam as he was originally conceived at Atlas Obscura.

The article is part of a series called Monster Mythology, which looks at lesser-known but scary legendary figures from around the world.

(Image credit: Staehle/Unusual Co.)

The British explorer James Clark Ross was the first one to determine the position of the magnetic North Pole in June 1831. At his time, he found it at Cape Adelaide on the Boothia Peninsula. At that time, it was already known that the magnetic pole moves, but in a slow manner.

Seventy-two years later, in 1903, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen found the magnetic North Pole again, albeit in a slightly different position. Over the next 90 years, the pole would move northwards at a rate of up to 15 kilometers per year.

Then, in 1990, it suddenly began to accelerate northwards. In 2017, it passed the geographic North Pole and is now heading south towards Siberia.

Scientists usually update the position of the magnetic pole every five years. But in 2019, the movement was so fast and unexpected that scientists were forced to issue an extra, irregular update so that navigation devices that rely on it could be corrected.

What causes the sudden acceleration of the magnetic North Pole?

Find out the answer over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Nietjuh/ Pixabay)

It is one thing to hear about stories about bikers getting hurt, or even killed, by drivers. You get angry and you get frustrated about drivers upon hearing these stories. It is another thing, however, when you get to see the story unfold with your own eyes — when you get to be the driver, who happened to seriously injure a biker on the road. When Brooke Warren experienced this, she realized that anyone could be “that driver.” It was a traumatizing, but enlightening, experience for her.

Read about Warren’s story over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

For the 35th anniversary celebration of Back to the Future, Universal Pictures put together a tribute from various artists and animators using widely varying styles. You'll be glad to know that unlike other "reimagined" projects, this one doesn't try to match the feature film shot-by-shot, so it's an enjoyable four minutes long. -via Boing Boing

What remains of the band AC/DC have been doing some publicity for their new album Power Up, and in one of the interviews, singer Brian Johnson told a story involving the late guitarist Malcolm Young and the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, alcohol was involved, as you might guess. And fireworks.  

“We both had these Land Rovers and we’d taken them for a trip around Scotland – Malcolm loved his fireworks and he’d taken a big box with him," Johnson said, looking back at the humorous event.

"One night, we were four sheets to the wind and staying at this hotel right on the side of the loch," he continued. "Mal just said, 'C’mon, let’s go and find the Loch Ness monster! I’ve got fireworks and it might attract it!'"

In their inebriated state, this appeared to make perfect logical sense.

Read what happened that night at Loudwire. -via Strange Company

The West Coast rock poster art of the 1960s was a phenomena then, and are collector's items now. Poster designers became famous in the art world -or some of the men did. Women who designed and printed psychedelic op art posters were overlooked, considered eye candy who were obviously just assisting the men who really created art. One of these was Donna Wallace-Cohen, then named Donna Herrick, who couldn't even get her name in a photo caption about the art. In San Francisco, she created posters for concerts by the Grateful Dead and The Doors, commissioned by the Love Conspiracy Commune. She also painted topless waitresses at Whisky A-Go-Go. Not paintings of them, but the actual waitresses.    

Wallace-Cohen’s next poster for the Love Conspiracy Commune advertised an evening at Winterland with the Grateful Dead, billed as The First Annual Love Circus, hence the psychedelic circus tent and giraffes in the center of Wallace-Cohen’s complex composition. “I think you had to be stoned to see it,” she says. “The colors were printed wrong,” she adds, “which made the lettering harder to read, but that also made it better.”

Today, Wallace-Cohen’s poster for this show is probably her most prized. A copy of the poster is owned by the Achenbach Foundation, the print-collection and paper-conservation arm of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and it marks the first time the Grateful Dead performed at Winterland, making it a favorite of Deadheads and rock-poster collectors alike. But on the night of March 3, 1967, the show almost didn’t go on when a Haight-Ashbury group called the Diggers picketed the show over the then-high price of $3.50 per ticket. For a while, the Dead refused to take the stage until enough of the Diggers had been admitted into the former ice rink for free.

The Diggers were apparently onto something when it came to their distrust of the Love Conspiracy Commune. Two months later to the day, San Francisco’s finest arrested eight people associated with the commune at a home in the city’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood—it turned out to be a front for a meth lab.

Wallace-Cohen eventually left San Francisco, but kept making art, which evolved over time. Read the adventures of an underrated artist who deserves notice at Collectors Weekly.

Raimond Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research created an open-source map that displays the changes to city streetscapes over a period of time. The map displays historically-accurate changes in any U.S. city dating back to 1800. The map can also show the cities in both a bird’s eye view and a pedestrian-level view, as FastCompany details: 

The map, called “rǝ,” is a project Kiveris has led through his research into artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. Though still in a very early form, the map is functional enough to offer a glimpse of what someone would have seen on a city street decades in the past.

The map was created using historical fire insurance maps, a rich source of information for the built environment that includes precise information about building ages, sizes, heights, roof shapes, and even materials. The map creates simplified 3D models of these buildings, and the time slider allows a user to see, for example, Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle nearly devoid of buildings in the 1870s and almost fully developed in the 1920s.

Kiveris wants the map to do more than model buildings over time. He and his team created it as an open-source project so that people such as librarians and map enthusiasts can contribute their own historical sources to add detail. It can even integrate photographs of buildings, using deep learning to analyze images and augment the blocky 3D models with architectural details.

Image via FastCompany 

The documentary series Star Trek: Voyager told the story of a Federation starship trapped on the far side of our galaxy that made a 7-year long journey back home. The captain of the Voyager was the legendary Kathryn Janeway.

Bloomington, Indiana now has a monument to its most famous daughter. Captain Janeway was born there on May 20, 2336. Her fans, organized under the banner of the Captain Janeway Bloomington Collective, funded and erected a statue in her honor.

One of Janeway's strongest supporters, the actress Kate Mulgrew, virtually attended the unveiling. She said of it:

I’m not often rendered speechless, but in this moment I am. How many people have such a marvelous thing done in their honor, in their memory. It’s a wonderful comment on Janeway’s legacy… And hearing you all speak today is deeply moving to me. To realize that Janeway has had such an important role in your lives, and I think in cultural history, it not only terribly affecting for me, but makes me want to go forth in a new way.

-via reddit

Nota Bene: Lest anyone argue that creating this monument violate the Temporal Prime Directive, be aware that that law applies to Starfleet personnel only. Of course, that doesn't mean that messing with the timeline this way isn't a hazardous idea.

Now that audiences are used to state-of-the-art effects and high quality film delivery, movies that are decades older suffer by comparison. Watching a horror film from the 1970s today, we are distracted by the obviously fake blood that doesn't look at all like the real thing. To understand what filmmakers got away with back then, we need to run through the history of fake blood. The most popular formula was that of Nextel Simulated Blood, developed by 3M and sold by the gallon.   

The distance between Nextel’s blood and the real stuff didn’t go unnoticed. Reviewing Argento’s Deep Red for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “an English-dubbed Italian-made bucket of ax-murder-movie clichés thoroughly soaked in red paint that seems intended to represent fake blood. I don’t think that Dario Argento, the director, meant to distance us from the action in this way. He’s simply a director of incomparable incompetence.” History has largely sided with Argento over Canby, at least when it comes to the overall quality of the director’s classic films. Argento’s blood, however, is another matter. “I was watching clips of Deep Red last night,” Shostrom says, “and it was the same thing. … Even as a kid, I’m thinking, ‘God, didn’t these people ever cut themselves and try to make something that matched?’” If you’re wondering whether Shostrom is joking, he’s not—Smith’s guide actually advises doing this very thing.

Filmmakers will argue over whether realistic blood is necessary or even desirable for a horror film, but you have to admit it looks more real in newer movies. Read the history of fake blood and the cost of authenticity at the Ringer. -via Digg