Humans have a good sense of smell but it isn't by sniffing like dogs. Our smell is retronasal which happens when breathing out through the nose while chewing and tasting. Smell receptors are on the inside of the nose connecting to the olfactory bulb near the front of the brain.
Knowing that, I chew much more thoroughly and get more enjoyment. In fact the pathways followed are similar to those in addiction which makes sense because being motivated to eat seems like a definite survival skill.
This book shows the important role of chance. The asteroid that hit earth about 66 million years ago caused the large animals like dinosaurs to become extinct giving the opportunity for small mammals and later primates to thrive. If that asteroid had hit a few minutes earlier or later it would have landed in the ocean. Continental drift is a slow process but the India plate is much thinner and moves a lot faster. Its crashing into Asia changed the climate to be more favorable to primates and then humans. So our species is lucky to be here. See also Full House by Steven Jay Gould that draws similar conclusions
Bernoulli's fallacy is common in current statistical applications, where studies are often not reproducible. The problem is that investigators ask the wrong question. One formulates a hypothesis and then asks whether the sample data is consistent with that hypotheses. But what is really needed is to find which hypothesis is suggested by the data.
One has to ask how likely is the hypothesis. Being consistent with an improbable hypothesis is not useful and can be very misleading. One need to state the prior probability of the hypothesis and consider alternatives. Bayesian methods are more appropriate than frequentist for many applications
available from https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/62353202/a-lie-too-big-to-fail-the-real-history-of-the-assassination-of-robert-f-ke
This book shows in great detail that a conspiracy was covered up and that there were many more bullets fired then Sirhan's gun held, even if he actually fired real bullets.
One quote I don't want to forget is from CIA Director William Casey who said during a staff meeting in the White House, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." The author states that "a simple scroll through the cognitive minefields of social media confirms that Mr. Casey's program is indeed complete."
This book provides an excellent summary of the fundamental contributions of Faraday and Maxwell. Faraday came from a poor family and was self-taught without much mathematics, but via careful experimentation developed the field concept of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell, an excellent mathematician, presented the fundamental equations of electromagnetism to which Einstein referred in his theory of special relativity.
Maxwell's equations can be expressed using the divergence and curl which are ways of describing how vectors vary in a small region surrounding the point. To visualize curl think of water flowing in a river. The vector here is the speed and direction of the flow. Imagine a tiny paddle wheel somehow fixed at a point in the river but with its axis free to take up any angle. If and only if the water is flowing faster on one side of the paddle wheel than the other, the wheel will spin, and its axis will take up the position that makes it spin fastest. The curl of the water flow at out point is a vector whose magnitude is proportional to the rate of spin, and whose direction is along the axis of spin. At a point in empty the curl of the electric field force at a oint is proportional to the rate at which the magnetic field force there is changing, and vice versa.
Divergence or div is a scalar. The divergence of the water flow at or fixed point is a measure of the excess of water flowing out of a small region surrounding the point compared with that flowing in. At a point in empty space the divergence of the electric field force and the divergence of the magnetic field force are both zero.
Damasio finds much wisdom in Spinoza's ideas. For example, "Spinoza also proposed that the power of affects is such that the only hope of overcoming a detrimental affect--an irrational passion--is by overpowering it with a stronger positive affect, one triggered by reason. An affect cannot be restrained or neutralized except by a contrary affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained ... Central to his thinking was the notion that the subdoing of the passions should be accomplished by reasoning induced emotion and not by pure reason alone."
"...More intriguing, however, was his notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body. ... As I shall discuss later I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brain's mappings of the body, collections of neural patters that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings."
Fungi and plants are entangled. When plants came ashore they didn't have roots. They paired with fungi. The plants could get energy via photosynthesis and the fungi could get minerals from the rocks and ground. Fungi are of prime importance in the development of life. This is a fascinating books explaining these relationships/
"Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is." Each chapter has case studies, insights from the author's life and exercises to become more aware of your deep self and the adjustments you have made to cope which are no longer necessary. A lot of our habits and personality derive from our efforts to cope over the years, especially in childhood when we do not fully understand and often blame ourselves for events beyond our control. The exercises are powerful and insightful.
