This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- When conversation dies — “Can the dead communicate with cell phones?” asks the headline of a press release from King’s University College, Canada…. The press release explains: “Dr. Imants Barušs, Professor of Psychology, has been awarded a $44,500 BIAL Foundation Grant for Scientific Research for his study After-Death Communication with Cell Phones.” …
- Gaming with Freud — Freudian psychotherapy, sometimes mocked as an entertaining but phantasmagorical relic from the old days, is alive and treating the unwell in the community of internet gamers. Georgios Floros and Ioanna Mylona in Greece gave a dose of Sigmund Freud to a gamer they call “George”. In a report titled “A psychoanalytic approach to internet gaming disorder”, they use Freudian language to analyse him: “George needed to prove himself in the eyes of his mother in order to receive affection, yet her gaze was not following him during his early childhood but her own ersatz selfobject.” …
- Unseen borders — The borders between trivial superpowers, trivial non-superpowers, non-trivial superpowers and non-trivial non-superpowers can be hard to discern. Trevor Howland gives an example for students to stop and savour as they stroll through Feedback’s growing catalogue of trivial superpowers: “My trivial superpower is to be able to walk in a straight line with my eyes closed. I can also look at a room, and close my eyes (or turn off the light), and be able to avoid all obstacles to get out of the room….
- Double-hander — Rosemary Firman, meanwhile, highlights a maybe not-so-trivial trivial superpower: “My husband Roger, who has been blind from birth, has the ability to read both sides of a page (written in Braille) at the same time, one with each hand….