In the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, Pat, the main character played by Bradley Cooper, stays up all night reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Enraged by the book’s ending, Pat snaps it closed, yells an expletive and throws it through the window. He then wakes his parents up at 4 a.m. to rant about it. This is an example of a manic episode. Viewer Discretion Advised: This Video Uses Strong Language While mania can impact people in different ways, those who experience manic ...read more
One of the great questions for humanity is whether we are alone in the universe. Indeed, astrobiologists appear tantalizingly close to being able to spot the signs of life on other Earths — should it exist elsewhere — using modern observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope. Now a group of astronomers have taken this question further by asking whether life could exist in other universes. In other words, they want to know whether we are alone in the multiverse. And they have develope ...read more
Four decades ago, philosopher Hilary Putnam described a famous and frightening thought experiment: A “brain in a vat,” snatched from its human cranium by a mad scientist who then stimulates nerve endings to create the illusion that nothing has changed. The disembodied consciousness lives on in a state that seems straight out of The Matrix, seeing and feeling a world that doesn’t exist. Though the idea was pure science fiction in 1981, it’s not so far-fetched today. Over the past decad ...read more
Metacognition is a fancy word for "thinking about thinking." We all do it, but how we do it can mean the difference between exacerbating depression and getting over it. When thoughts pop into our heads, they usually pop right back out. But sometimes we invest a lot of importance to them. If you do that, explains Aaron Brinen, assistant professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, you're going to pay much more attention to them. Then these thoughts begin to mean something; yo ...read more
Just a few weeks ago, city officials in Lake Elsinore, Calif., shut down their trails to prevent members of the public from disrupting a potential superbloom of golden poppy flowers in the region. The shutdown was to prevent chaos from breaking out over people trying to view the flowers, much like what happened in Lake Elsinore in 2019 when a different superbloom took place. But what exactly is a superbloom, and why are people so intent on seeing one? The Basics of a Superbloom Superbl ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine