Weekly Filet #178: Your Brain's 36-Hour-Days. And more.
1. How extreme isolation warps the mind (BBC)
This piece is a couple of months old, but won't fail to twist your brain. You've probably been lucky enough not to experience such a situation yourself, but solitary confinement and complete darkness do strange things to people's brains fairly quickly. For example, researchers have found that in darkness, most people eventually adjust to a 48-hour cycle: 36 hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep.
2. They Know
This is a really impressive BA thesis. Christian Gross has designed an interface that the people surveilling you might use. Makes this abstract issue so much more tangible.
3. Multitask (Instant Game)
A great way to waste some time: Instant Game gives you a random browser game to play with. The one I'm linking to is incredibly difficult, I dare you to get past the 1-minute-mark.
4. How New Brain Implants Can Boost Free Will (Aeon Magazine)
Free will — its existence or absence — has been a matter of heated debate for philosophers and neuroscientists for decades. Is free will, after all, a capacity of the brain that people can lose — and that can be given back to them by means of implants?
5. How the Shinkansen bullet train made Tokyo into the monster it is today (The Guardian)
The Shinkansen, Japan's bullet train, has had an anniversary this week. This is a very interesting piece on how the high-speed train has transformed the country and especially Tokio (also, an astonishing bit of trivia: It runs 323 times between Tokio and Osaka — every day!).
That's it for this week. A quick reminder: If you'd like to tell me what you liked or didn't like in this Weekly Filet (or even if you just want to say Hi), just reply to this email.
Have a nice weekend!