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 ...
89
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 ...
39
Sadly, no.
This is another one of those cases where someone seems to have found a phenomenon and decides to ask "what can I claim it does?"
Binaural beats are simply an artifact of the way the brain perceives sound.
In sense, it would be the same as someone claiming that you can treat erectile dysfunction by looking at an optical illusion.
Problem ...
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 ...
33
Edit: I've looked into this and am updating it to the full answer. Here goes...
Re. Habermas and his claims in particular
I emailed the source of these claims, Dr. Habermas, to try and obtain the "list of over one-hundred evidential cases" he refers to in his debates/talks. He did not have such a list (I can provide the exact email if requested). He ...
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
Caffeine is a stimulant which makes you feel less tired and, for athletes, delays exhaustion. So if the alternative is being asleep, caffeine cetainly helps.
The other issue is that the regular use of caffeine leads, as with other psychoactive substances, to dependency (tolerance or addiction are other words used). In such cases, lack of caffeine leads to ...
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
Mental exhaustion (also mental fatigue, mental stress) is certainly absolutely real, and in no way related to boredom or loss of motivation. In fact the opposite is usually the case - many studies relate mental exhaustion to a perceived inability to perform a task that they really want to perform. A significant instance is RAF fighter pilots during the ...
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, ...
21
There does seem to be a distinct difference in composition of emotional tears, compared to basal and reflex tears (review in german). The emotional tears were found to contain about 24% more protein than reflex tears (Frey et al., 1981). Also found were increased concentrations of Prolactin, manganese, potassium compared to serum concentrations, as well as ...
21
From HowStuffWorks:
There are more than 40 theories as to
what déjà vu is and what causes it,
and they range from reincarnation to
glitches in our memory processes.
Déjà vu is extremely difficult to
study because it occurs briefly,
unannounced, only in certain people,
and has no witnesses or physical
manifestations other than the person
...
20
Where did the idea that EMF meters can detect ghosts come from? Why has it become so widely accepted?
(But seriously, they were scientists and used beepy flashy things to detect ghosts)
This 2005 article states that EMF meters have been used for "ghost hunting" for decades:
[A] major stimulus of today's tech-heavy ghost-hunting trend happened in 1984: ...
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
Here's a study from the 1975:
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03014467500000811
Summary
Verbal and performance scores in a standard intelligence test (WAIS) were considered in relation to patterns of hand preference (measured by questionnaire) in a large sample of the general population.
Left-handers and mixed-handers did not obtain ...
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
I used to visit the link above a couple of times. Each time, the initial direction of spinning was different. The reason is that the image is, in reality, a 2D image shifting back and forth. According to this source, our brain has not evolved to deal with 2D images, so it takes clues from the image to reconstruct a 3D model. This happens in the Visual Cortex....
17
An experiment was performed that showed that people don't think faster, but do have a perception that time runs slower.
The experiment was reported in Not Exactly Rocket Science, a blog associated with Discover Magazine.
Chess Stetson, Matthew Fiesta and David Eagleman demonstrated the illusion by putting a group of volunteers through 150 terrifying feet ...
17
We don't know conclusively one way or another.
A recent 2011 study [Full PDF Version] completely contradicts most of the previous research on the topic. My previous answer (left intact below) probably cited studies that used unintentionally biased groups of "users" and "non-users".
Specifically, this new study released compared only those people associated ...
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
Going through the different parts of this question, here are the answers I found:
Are male and female brains different?
Yes. While searching around the internet I found a handfuls of websites with nearly all of them pointed to the same set of differences. I also found various references to studies that I was unable to access (or, admittedly, understand.) ...
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 ...
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