101
If Homer talks about the dark-wine sea, it seems he also talks about the "blue eyebrows of Poseidon". You can read here about Homer's colorful descriptions that helped orators remember the verses of his poems.
κυανό is known to be "blue" for ancient greeks and became "cyan" in english.
In this book about Homer writing, κυανό entry represents "smalt, blue ...
90
The first claim is based on the research of Berlin and Kay "Basic Color Terms", which posits the hypothesis that languages evolve colour terms in the following order, and therefore that ancient languages did not possess separate terms for blue and green:
Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm
Stage II: Red
Stage III: Either green or yellow
Stage IV: Both green ...
64
A 2011 literature review looked at the problem as it related to one particular condition: Difficulties in diagnosing pulmonary embolism in the obese patient:
A literature review.
They conclude that there is a problem - not only are many CT scanners unable to handle morbidly obese patients (although this is improving), there are no guidelines for when this ...
60
Yes.
You are referring to a classic experiment in Perceptual Adaptation from 1896:
George M. Stratton, Some Preliminary Experiments On Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image (Read at the Third International Congress for Psychology, Munich, August, 1896.)
Here's a video from a BBC documentary reproducing the experiment. You can also check this book ...
52
A “newton” is the international unit of force. A human adult’s maximum biting force ranges from 520-1,178 newtons depending on factors such as age and gender. It requires less than 200 newtons to bite through a raw carrot. This is well within the normal limits of the average person. Biting through a finger requires so much force that attempts often lead to ...
38
TLDR : Yes. A person wearing glasses that inverted the vision would in a few days adapt and perceive the vision as normal.
see Perceptual Adaptation
George M. Stratton, a psychologist, was intrigued by the idea of
perceptual adaptation. Because the retina receives images upside down,
he was intrigued to see what happens when the brain receives an ...
31
Ancient Hebrew has the word תכלת for blue (or more specifically, azure), as attested to in the Bible:
Numbers 15:38:
Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments, throughout their generations, and they shall affix a thread of sky blue [wool] on the fringe of each ...
25
The Scientific Consensus: No evidence they reduce cognitive decline
In October 2014, a consensus statement was produced that rejected the key claims about brain games. The list of signatories include Susanne Jaeggi, Michael Kane, Randy Engle, Hal Pashler and a number of other people who can be considered eminent in this field (and who you'll find cited ...
24
Reasons for switching?
Generally today, in the western world, left-handed people are equally accepted as right-handed people and should not experience any major drawbacks. Today, a child can easily work with the left hand. Thanks to some tools such as scissors, writing pads and pens for left-handed no problems are expected. If a child does have bad deal, ...
20
The sentence is technically true, albeit drawing any conclusion about animal feelings from it would be very questionable.
Our neurons secrete several substances, such as neurotransmitters, neuromodulators and neurohormones in many different situations. The same molecules are used by a dog's neurons, or by those of a fruit fly or an earthworm for that ...
20
Birth order does not influence IQ but social rank in the family does.
Birth order is not associated with intelligence in between-family data once the number of siblings is statistically controlled. The analyses support the admixture hypothesis, which avers that the apparent birth-order effect on intelligence is an artifact of family size, and cast doubt ...
19
The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron
forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than
a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single
memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a
few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a
...
17
As has been pointed out in the comment above, the specific claim that we see ourselves as exactly five times more attractive is a little absurd. There are no units measuring beauty, that I am aware of.
In social sciences, when the attractiveness of an individual has to be rated, it is rated on a scale where, for example, one would mean low attractiveness ...
17
A History of Neuroscience article titled Genealogy of the "Grandmother Cell" by Charles G. Gross (Princeton University) says that it's fictional, a tall tale: told by Jerry Letvin in 1969 as part of an M.I.T. course he gave.
The patient in the story was called Portnoy, whose Complaint was about his mother.
16
What a case of sneaky reporting!
Let's dissect the sequence of events in detail:
A Croatian girl learns German (enough to read books and watch movies).
Her parents don't think she is very good. They are not German experts though.
She goes in a coma, wakes up and speaks German but not Croatian.
The hospital director makes a very generic declaration, e.g. "...
15
"Ears do not cross hemispheres"
That's obviously wrong. Hearing, from both ears, is first processed by one of the parts of brainstem — mesencephalon (aka midbrain). On higher level it's processed by primary auditory cortex.
15
A number of injuries have been attributed to the practice of head-banging to music.
The following list are individual case-studies, so should be considered little more than well-considered anecdotes.
Carotid Dissection - a 15 year-old died of an aneurysm.
Subdural Haemorrhage - 29-year-old had headaches for a week.
Fatal Subdural haemorrhage - No abstract ...
15
This addresses the second claim.
There are 4 types of photoreceptive neurons in your eye. One is the rod, which is sensitive to green but creates a black/white percept (for "scotopic" or night-adjusted vision) and the other 3 are cones with various types of rhodopsin, a receptor that is sensitive to photons.
In a normal, unmutated (non-colorblind) person, ...
14
Yes, excessive alcohol is neurotoxic.
This has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt; there is a substantial body of research in the field going back for quite some time. Evidence for this comes from a wide range of animal based research (for examples, see Crews FT, Nixon K (2009) Mechanisms of neurodegeneration and regeneration in alcoholism. Alcohol and ...
14
The claims about euphoria are certainly nonsense.
First off, for a neuron to do anything, it needs to be stimulated appropriately. None of the neurons that are sensitive to touch and pressure are in the brain:
Light touch is detected by receptors in the skin. These are often
found close to a hair follicle...
Pacinian corpuscles are pressure
...
14
It's reported, but not conclusively demonstrated by experiment. Also, in some cases sex is known to cause migraine. I found absolutely no evidence for it being more than a temporary analgesic, let alone a cure.
source
Primary sexual headache
This is a well known ailment which affects about 1% of the population. There are three main kinds:
Early ...
13
Short version:
A short-sleep human phenotype has been described in the literature. However, the reported sleep times I found in the scientific literature for those people are around 6h / day vs. 8h for controls, so nowhere near 2 h.
About Tesla: The Wiki page has a paragraph on his sleeping habits where biographies are cited that he claimed to never ...
12
The claim is not true; neurons continue to form, and the connections between them to change, throughout our lives.
This paper on neurogenesis (i.e. forming of new brain cells) opens with this sentence:
It is now well documented that active neurogenesis does exist
throughout the life span in the brain of various species including
human.
However, it ...
12
It is a well known fact that religious experiences and olfactory hallucinations are related to epilepsy or seizure of the temporal lobe.
References:
Temporal lobe signs and reports of subjective paranormal experiences in a normal population: a replication.
7 [cases, n.d.r.] were direct temporal lobe signs that implied deepened affect, auditory-...
12
Yes
https://www.centeronaddiction.org/what-addiction/addiction-disease
Addiction is defined as a disease by most medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
Like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, addiction is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological ...
11
The website you quote makes it sound like the subconsciousness is a little man in your brain, with a book of knowledge, reviewing all the material during the night and "strengthening knowledge without your influence". Although the website doesn't properly support the idea about how post-training sleep might benefit memory consolidation, it does convey some "...
11
No, staring at a flame will not slow brain activity.
First of all, let's define brain activity, and see what 'slow' would mean in this context.
I had a lot of trouble finding a source that's neither completely technical nor completely nonsensical. In the end I opted for a combination of the two. Here is a semi-nonsensical one from which I am quoting the ...
11
No one knows what "mind" is, but the brain is a bad candidate for hosting quantum superpositions, much less sharing them with other people.
The most credible proponent of mind having a quantum component is the physicist Roger Penrose who has argued, beginning in his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind that the human mind displays non-computable behavior and ...
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