I just found a link to this stupid article on MSN (surprise!) which promised to “explain” why Anna Nicole Smith was acting weird at whatever awards show she fumbled her way through last week. I mean, does anybody really need an explanation for anything that she does anymore? I thought she moved outside of the […]

All that talk of childhood games made me also remember one of my favorites that we used to play in recess. It’s called Red Rover. Maybe you’ve played it. If not or if it’s been a while, it’s one of those games you have to play outside. You split your group of kids up into […]

I’m trying to find connections between sports & games to rituals & religion. In doing so, I’ve come across a variety of different things. The latest is a couple articles I found off that newly-launched Google Scholar thing, which is supposed to have “scholarly papers” and pdf’s and shit.

Can Sports Exist Without Religion?

Gospel on […]

There is a Cambridge professor named Simon Baron-Cohen who has this theory about just what autism is. In a nutshell, he says that biologically, female brains are better at empathizing, and that male brains are better at systems thinking. So, in his theory the tendency of the male brain towards systems takes an extreme […]

While doing research on empathy, I also remembered/came across information about the practice of “mirroring” somebody’s body language. The two places I’ve always heard about it talked the most are in business and in romance. It basically relates to this whole “monkey see, monkey do” thing (also, “follow the leader”) with empathy and imitation, and […]

From an article entitled, “Mirror, Mirror: Our Brains are Hardwired for Empathy“, this passage talks about how mirror neurons, and the possible biological basis for empathy was accidentally discovered during unrelated research on monkeys:
In 1996, an Italian neuroscience research team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese was studying grasping behaviors in monkeys. They attached […]