scholarly journals Turning the Other Lobe: Directional Biases in Brain Diagrams

i-Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 204166951770776
Author(s):  
Richard Wiseman ◽  
Adrian M. Owen

Past research shows that in drawn or photographic portraits, people are significantly more likely to be posed facing to their right than their left. We examined whether the same type of bias exists among sagittal images of the human brain. An exhaustive search of Google images using the term ‘brain sagittal view’ yielded 425 images of a left or right facing brain. The direction of each image was coded and revealed that 80% of the brains were right-facing. This bias was present in images that did not contain any representation of a human head. It is argued that the effect might be aesthetic in nature, the result of the Western tradition of reading left to right or due to the facial factors that underlie the bias previously found in portraits.

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact (a ‘stupefying fact’, he calls it) that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-155
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi

Turning to an example provided by Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in Politics of Friendship, which functions as a limit case—loving the other beyond death—I argue that Derrida's short-lived term, aimance, gently and lovingly contests the primacy given either to love or to friendship in the Western tradition, but also to the living act of loving and the figure of the lover, putting pressure on the very conceptual differences between these terms.


1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
F. A. Todd

Blockhead or or Baldhead?(i) Petron. Sat. 39. 12: ‘in Aquario (nascuntur) copones et cucurbitae’.(ii) Apul.Met. I. 15: ‘nos cucurbitae caput non habemus ut pro te moriamur’.Cucurbita in its literal use is the name of many varieties of the numerous family of Cucurbitaceae, as one may learn, e.g. from Plin. Nat. Hist. xix. It is also the name of the cupping instrument called by Juvenal, xiv. 58, uentosa cucurbita, for which see Mayor's note ad loc. For other metaphorical uses of the name, Forcellini and the Thes. Ling. Lat. cite only the two passages quoted above; of these two, Lewis and Short cite only the former. Lexicographers and editors,1 comparing the one passage with the other, concur in the view that the cucurbita is the symbol of stupidity, and that a stupid man may be called a cucurbita, as in Petronius, or be said cucurbitae caput habere, as in Apuleius. At first sight their interpretation of the Apuleian phrase is plausible, for it makes tolerable sense in the context and appears to be supported by such modern expressions as ‘pumpkin-head’ and Kürbiskopf and κεχλι κολοκνθνιον, all of which liken the head of a stupid man to a pumpkin or other gourd which, though bearing some resemblance to a human head, encloses not a brain but an insensate mass of pulp and seeds. But ‘to have a pumpkin-head’ and ‘to be a pumpkin’ are prima facie very different, for the latter equates the man himself with the cucurbita, whereas it is only qua substitute for a head that the cucurbita can typify stupidity; and when it is further observed that in the Petronian passage cucurbitae so interpreted accords ill with the context, it becomes clear that some other explanation must be sought.


2018 ◽  
Vol 122 (6) ◽  
pp. 2331-2347
Author(s):  
Meng-Ning Tsai ◽  
Ching-Lin Wu ◽  
Yu-Lin Chang ◽  
Hsueh-Chih Chen

Past research found that similar appreciation for humor exists between spouses, but it is not certain whether this similarity between spouses also exists in kindhearted or malicious humor. The present study investigated the similarity of Taiwanese married couples’ humor styles. Participants included 239 couples (mean age = 42.9 years) who had been married to each other for at least 10 years. We used a traditional Chinese edition of the Humor Styles Questionnaire to measure the humor style and clustered participants’ humor styles in order to examine the similarity between spouses. The results show that husbands have higher tendencies toward aggressive (Cohen’s d = 0.29, p < .01) and self-defeating (Cohen’s d = 0.35, p < .01) humor styles than wives. Results from multilevel modeling indicate that spouses’ aggressive ( p < .001, confidence interval = .17, .41) and self-defeating ( p < .01, confidence interval = .05, .30) humor styles acting as a valid predictor to the other spouses’ negative humor styles. Furthermore, the results show that personal humor styles could be categorized into four clusters: positive humor endorsers, negative humor endorsers, general humor endorsers, and humor deniers. According to the clusters within spouse pairs, results show that similarities in humor styles exist between spouses (χ2 = 16.73, p = .01). The current study finds that most couples have similar humor styles and that a high proportion of married couples share the same humor clusters.


Problemos ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Rita Šerpytytė

Straipsnio tikslas yra atskleisti Vakarų filosofijos tradicijoje savitai įsitvirtinusios patyrimo struktūros, įvardijamos pakartojimu, nihilistinę prasmę. Šioje hermeneutinėje analizėje, viena vertus, re­miamasi tam tikra nihilizmo samprata, numatančia du nihilizmo teorinius modelius – nihilizmą, parem­tą Überwindung teorija, ir nihilizmą, paremtą différance idėja. Kita vertus, remiamasi tam tikru („onto-teologiniu“) pretekstu Vakarų mąstymo tradicijoje atpažįstant pakartojimo struktūrą – Pauliaus Laiško efeziečiams Ef. I, 10 teksto fragmentu, laikomu paradigmine pakartojimo struktūros išsklaida. Herme­neutinė analizė projektuojama į Kierkegaardo ir Agambeno filosofiją, atskirus jų mąstyme atpažįstamus pakartojimo invariantus atskleidžiant kaip minėto Pauliaus Laiško fragmento eksplozijos atvejus. Ke­liamas klausimas, kas yra pakartojimas, kur slypi jo negatyvumas ir kaip pasirodo jo nihilistinė prasmė? Kaip šioje negatyvumo ir nihilizmo atskleistyje „tarpininkauja“ différance? Straipsnyje parodoma, jog skirtis kaip neigimo judesys, atstovaujantis nihilistinei logikai, gali būti traktuojamas ir vien formaliai, ir realiai. Skirties kaip realaus neigimo traktavimas Kierkegaardo ir Agambeno mąstyme atitinka pačios patirties struktūros – pakartojimo – ontologinį (tikrovišką) įšaknytumą.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: pakartojimas, nihilizmas, différance, negatyvumas, laikasPakartojimas ir nihilizmasRita Šerpytytė   AbstractThe purpose of this article is to reveal the nihilistic sense of an experiential structure, which has been distinctively rooted in Western philosophical tradition. On the one hand, this hermeneutical analysis will be based on a certain conception of nihilism presupposing two theoretical models of nihilism – nihilism, which refers to the theory of Überwindung, and nihilism associated with the idea of différance. On the other hand, it builds upon a certain (the so-called “onto-theological”) pretext, which might be used for recognition of the structure of repetition in Western tradition of thinking, – i.e. the fragment of a text from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians Eph. I, 10 – the paradigmatic passage proposing this universal structure of repetition. Focused both on philosophy of Kierkegaard and Agamben, hermeneutical analysis will aim to disclose the separate invariants of such repetition as cases of explosion of the mentioned text fragment. The question is raised – what is repetition? Where does its negativity lie? How does its nihilistic sense appear? How does the différance mediate in this process of revealing of negativity and nihilism? The article argues that difference, as a motion of negation representing nihilistic logic, can be treated both in merely formal and in a realistic way. The treating of différance as real denying in Kierkegaard’s and Agamben’s thinking corresponds to the ontological rootedness of the very structure of experience – repetition.Keywords: repetition, nihilism, différance, negativity, time


Author(s):  
Bruce W. Hardy

What role do presidential candidate character traits play in vote decisions? To some, the answer is obvious as campaigns, journalists, pundits, and voters frequently differentiate presidential candidates in terms of their personal qualities—traits are deemed important. On the other hand, past research suggests that, while candidate character traits are short term forces, they hold relatively limited in influence on vote preference. However, theoretical and methodological limitations may have hindered past research ability to detect the true influence of character traits in voter decisions. This author reviews past literature, offers a clear conceptualization of candidate character traits, presents ways in which trait may influence vote choice, and suggests areas for future research.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salima Ouadfel ◽  
Souham Meshoul

Thresholding is one of the most used methods of image segmentation. It aims to identify the different regions in an image according to a number of thresholds in order to discriminate objects in a scene from background as well to distinguish objects from each other. A great number of thresholding methods have been proposed in the literature; however, most of them require the number of thresholds to be specified in advance. In this paper, three nature-inspired metaheuristics namely Artificial Bee Colony, Cuckoo Search and Bat algorithms have been adapted for the automatic multilevel thresholding (AMT) problem. The goal is to determine the correct number of thresholds as well as their optimal values. For this purpose, the article adopts—for each metaheuristic—a new hybrid coding scheme such that each individual solution is represented by two parts: a real part which represents the thresholds values and a binary part which indicates if a given threshold will be used or not during the thresholding process. Experiments have been conducted on six real test images and the results have been compared with two automatic multilevel thresholding based PSO methods and the exhaustive search method for fair comparison. Empirical results reveal that AMT-HABC and AMT-HCS algorithms performed equally to the solution provided by the exhaustive search and are better than the other comparison algorithms. In addition, the results indicate that the ATM-HABC algorithm has a higher success rate and a speed convergence than the other metaheuristics.


1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 1298-1302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazuhiro Kosuge ◽  
Toshihiko Uematsu ◽  
Sei-Ichi Araki ◽  
Hiroyuki Matsuno ◽  
Kyoichi Ohashi ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT The distribution of ofloxacin (OFLX) along the shaft of each of three hair types, i.e., head, axillary and pubic, was investigated and compared among five healthy male volunteers 1 to 4 months after ingestion of OFLX for 1 or 2 days (total dose, 200 or 600 mg). Five strands of each hair type were sectioned together into successive 0.5-cm lengths starting from the dermal end, over a length of ≤6 cm, and the OFLX concentration in each hair section was measured by high-pressure liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. The distribution of OFLX along the head hair shaft was narrow, having a single peak even 3 to 4 months after administration, suggesting a rather uniform growth rate among hair strands. On the other hand, the OFLX distribution along axillary or pubic hair shafts tended to be broad, even having two apparent peaks, and the growth rate did not seem uniform. Since axillary hair seemed to stop growing after having gained a length of ≤4 to 5 cm, it was suggested to enter a resting stage after the growth of ≤3 cm over the 2 to 4 months after OFLX incorporation. These findings indicate that head hair is the most suitable for analysis of individual drug use and the larger growth rate and cycle stage variabilities of strands of the other types of hair should be taken into account.


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