Chimps and Humans The timeline between chimps and humans is six or eight million years. Humans became humans only a couple hundred thousand years ago. But chimps and likely proto-humans can communicate well without using spoken words. Non Verbal Communication https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Sept08Loop.mp4 It’s estimated that up to 93 percent of human communication is […]
Trigger Happy Alien Spirits
Secret Assassin There’s a pretty common idea that is in a lot of movies about government trained assassins. That you are a trained assassin, but you don’t remember this. That if somebody called you and said your trigger word, you would suddenly remember all your assassin training and go kill the targets. […]
Emergent Alien Consciousness
Self Awareness One of the most perplexing scientific ideas is self awareness. Of being aware of our own thoughts we think them. Of being aware of our own words as we speak them. Of being aware of the never ending loop between brain and speech and thought and ideas and memories and […]
Magic Horse Mind Control
Six Plus Two About fifty years ago there was this guy who had a magic horse. He wasn’t really magic, but he could do basic addition and subtraction. Some guy would ask what’s two plus six, and the horse would stamp is hoof eight times. Then he’d ask what’s three minus one, […]
The Once And Future Hallucination
The Demon There was this philosopher guy a couple hundred years ago named Descartes. He came up with a problem that was unsolvable then, and unsolvable now. The problem was how do we know whether what is happening all around us is real, or just a hallucination? His idea was that our […]
Data Transfer Brain
Hard Drive Shopping I went to a local pc shop recently. I wanted to buy an external hard drive. It’s amazing how much they’ve improved over the years. You can transfer a few gigs in seconds, and store several terabytes of data for less than a hundred bucks. On the other hand, thought, […]
How To Make Her Fall In Love
I love metaphors, and how we use them in every day language. Most people are familiar with story telling metaphors, like Aesop’s Fables. These have pretty clear meanings, like slow and steady wins the race, or a bird in the hand is worth in the bush (which is a metaphor in itself.) Then there are […]
How To Covertly Change Beliefs With Storytelling
Telling stories is a great way to persuade people. We’ve had stories embedded in our culture, all human cultures, since the dawn of time. Stories around the ancient campfire at night, all the way to the latest blockbusters opening up this weekend. Some things are better said directly, others are better explained through metaphor. It […]