Word: understandingly
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...intimate part of our lives sooner than we think. "It's not so futuristic," says Stanford neuropsychologist Judy Illes, "to imagine an employer able to test for who is a good team player, who a leader or a follower." Before such scans are used, neuroethicists warn, we must understand what they can and cannot do. A device that might be helpful in personnel testing, for example, might not be rigorous enough to be used in a criminal trial, where the standard of proof is higher. That's currently the case with the polygraph. But Farah is afraid that because...
...novel objects. In other words, when Daniel has seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same color. The mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to leap to the conclusion that infants can understand the concept of an impossibility from the mere fact that they are able to perceive some novelty in it. "The real explanation is boring," he says...
Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios...
Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because...
...They'll be back soon though, according to Ronald Sayegh, the founder of Skileb. "Arabs understand the situation," he said. "The nice thing is that once it's calm, they are always ready to come to Lebanon. As long as we have snow." Indeed, with hardly any snow in the Alps thanks to an extraordinarily mild winter in Europe, desperate Western powder hounds may not have much alternative to doing their skiing in the Middle East...