In the 2005 study, researchers found that when 17 young participants were shown a photo of the person they loved, regions of the brain responsible for motivating and rewarding began to function. In other words, the study found that romantic love motivates people, and the motivation toward this goal -- loving and being loved -- is fueled by the brain's reward system [source: APS]. The imaging also showed that while the emotional centers of the brain were active, no distinct pattern of emotions was followed. This finding counters the longstanding view that love is based in emotion; instead, it seems that love springs from our goal-seeking behavior and that the emotions we attach to it come second to our motivation.

This combination of dopamine (which induces feelings of pleasure), oxytocin (which is associated with feelings of attachment) and vasopressin (which also promotes attachment and also allows social recognition) leads to a learned behavior where we actually become addicted to our mate

The chemical oxytocin, for example, plays a role in parental bonding. It's released in mothers during childbirth, and it plays a role in the production and release of breast milk

Thoughts Can “Rewire” Your Brain

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss

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We found that, next to musical training, the personality trait of openness was the strongest predictor of musical sophistication. People who score highly for openness are imaginative, have a wide range of interests, and are open to new ways of thinking and changes in their environment.

a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

The participants with relatively strong spatial abilities tended to gravitate towards, and excel in, scientific and technical fields such as the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

In 1868 Thomas Huxley produced his essay A Liberal Education, and where to find it. Not at Oxford and Cambridge apparently. Huxley dismissed both as “simply "boarding schools” for bigger boys". British universities, he argued, must embrace research as the basis of great university education. At present, he lamented “a third rate German university turns out more produce of that kind…in one year, than our vast and wealthy foundations elaborate in ten”.

As John Stuart Mill would tell graduates at St Andrew’s University in 1867, until recently the old English universities "seemed to exist mainly for the repression of independent thought, and the chaining up of the individual intellect and conscience”.

“But it is futile. In Japan, one thing blends into another seamlessly. And importantly, nobody (no Japanese, anyway) worries about where the line is drawn. I would agree with the shell-less egg analogy. I cannot successfully engage in a conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet, I am certainly Japanese, in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this undefinable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.’”One of the best descriptions I have read of someone trying to “understand” Japan compared the process to peeling an onion. The cultural explorer pulls back layer after layer looking for Japan’s inner meaning, without realising that the meaning is to be found in the discarded layers. At the centre of the onion is nothing.

The truth is that the discrepancy in sales is not a much a testament to specs, or even what Sony has done right, but what Microsoft has done wrong.

Many felt that the rush to put a new console out before Sony contributed to the hardware demons possessing the system.

OUP is its own sort of beast. I think of it less as a university press and more as the last remaining political institution of the British Empire. In fact I think of it as that empire.

There’s a big difference between, say, McGill-Queens University Press and Elsevier. One of them is a small press which really is in it for the love of publishing good books. The other is part of a massive corporation whose idea of demonstrating corporate responsibility is cutting its connections to the weapons industry.

Just as the professionalization of philosophy--and the endless need for doctoral students to find new topics--has brought us a large volume of scholarship on obscure figures of dubious philosophical merit associated with, e.g., 19th-century German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, so too it is hard to imagine that there won't be for a long time scholarship on the central figures of 20th-century analytical philosophy, like Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Kripke.

Near the end of the twentieth century, very few philosophers of the nineteenth are much read: Peirce and Frege, Mill, Bentham, and Sidgwick, Hegel, Nietzsche, and perhaps Schopenhauer.

around mid-20th-century, the Harvard Philosophy Department, then clearly the dominant department in the U.S., included on its faculty (not all at the same time) a young W.V.O. Quine, a much older C.I. Lewis, as well as Donald Williams, Ralph Barton Perry, John Wild, William Ernest Hocking, Raphael Demos. Just a half-century later, almost all these (at the time) eminent and widely respected figures are largely forgotten.