I understand your point, although I didn't think I was invoking the idea of a linear developmental sequence. (I also don't really see Levi-Strauss as referring to one, except in a mostly critical way: the sense in which he refers to a "hot" versus a "cold" society. He seems to me rather against the concept of a…

Here's the official extended trailer as well:

Well, the post refers to reports of echolocators playing basketball and mountain biking. These people are really like auditory-discrimination and spatial-mapping geniuses. If they had sight, who knows what that kind of ability would translate into. They also are presumably extraordinarily confident. It's kind of…

This study and others like it suggest to me that we could revisit the question: did people from "primitive" cultures who exhibited extraordinary sensory discrimination have very different functional brain activity? (I think the answer must clearly be yes.)

Spatial representation is multi-modal: visual, auditory, kinesthetic/somatic, etc. It's probably composed of multiple overlapping and partially integrated (or coordinated) "maps." Because it also is required for the successful performance of physical actions, it must contain some temporal elements as well. Because…

Grounding this story in the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis actually works against this storyline, because you just can't believe that Kevin Bacon orchestrated these events.

I agree with you about the end. I also was kind of hoping that the movie didn't go into Xavier losing the use of his legs. It seemed like the movie set up a potentially interesting alternate history movie-verse and a fascinating relationship between Xavier and Magneto. It would have been very cool to see that…

The way I think of it, the higher processing regions of the cortex are not sensory-modality specific; rather, they are more functionally specific. In other words, there is something about the structural organization of a certain region that makes it good at performing certain "calculations" or "computational"…

That's pretty interesting. I haven't heard of transient synaesthesia like that before. Too bad it's more or less impossible to fall asleep in an MRI machine, because it would be interesting to compare what's happening to the usual cases of synaesthesia.

It sounds like you have synaesthesia.

I don't know of any such evidence. The only information I was referring to came from ethnological studies from the past few hundred years. It's speculative even to project that data back to the beginning of the Neolithic era or into the Paleolithic. (The main justification for projecting that far back would be by…

Very interesting. Information from these peripheral retinal neurons may be processed differently in the brain as well. I wonder if the distribution is the result downward regulation from the part of the brain that integrates ambient auditory cues with peripheral vision.

Good point. There's a lot of human emotion being communicated in Caesar's facial expressions. And much eerier than seeing that in, e.g. Gollum.

There was a lot of that sentiment in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in particular, and to some degree in the original movie series as a whole. This movie, like Conquest, sets up the audience to root for the chimpanzees, but it lacks the time travel quasi-paradox of the original movie series.

This means that, millions of years ago, it was women who went elsewhere to find a mate, which isn't necessarily intuitive if you think in terms of modern social customs.

...or doorknobs...

The way that religion intersected with Starbuck's character development fell into the definition of deus ex machina, which kind of naturally gets interpreted as a flawed plot device.

Nice article.

I'm reminded of this thing I heard or read somewhere. Someone predicted that social networking would lead to a decline in attendance at high school and college reunions and did a study suggesting that that has proved to be the case. It does seem like people like to know what other people are doing, even if (or maybe…

IMO, the earlier X-Men trilogy fell into error by throwing in the Dark Phoenix narrative to begin with. Dark Phoenix was a super-human, irrational, completely uncontrollable force. I can understand the temptation, because in the comics it's epic and well-loved. But throwing that in generally weakened the overall…