April 5, 2013

Does Anybody Remember Laughter? How to Make Information Fun Again

If you’re losing your sense of humor, if you’re not able to laugh at things, then what are you doing?

It’s an indicator that maybe information that you’re consuming has more power over you than you have over it. If you can’t laugh at something, if you can’t make something funny then you might be running into problems.

A lot of scientific research has been done about how laughter and a sense of humor is actually a positive cognitive clean-you-up mechanism for your brain. It’s a way for us to sort of make sense of the stuff that doesn’t really make sense at a neurophysiological level.

So really thinking about and appreciating and developing a good sense of humor actually can combat a poor information diet pretty well.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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