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clipped from www.npr.org

clipped from www.npr.org

A Word About Our Name

Why "Monkey See"?

Monkeys: You can study them to learn about human behavior, or you can dress them up in funny outfits and have them deliver telegrams. Which is to say, they lie exactly at the intersection of anthropology and comedy. (See Figure A.)

That spot — the intersection of high and low — is the territory this blog stakes out. You can, after all, learn a lot about people from what they choose to watch, listen to and read. You can also have a lot of fun viewing YouTube videos of local news anchors sneezing in the middle of a broadcast.

Of course, the name also plays off the famous three monkeys — the ones who see, hear and speak no evil. Because to us, despite a whiff at times of guilty pleasure, there's not much in the pop universe that feels "evil."

clipped from www.nytimes.com

For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context.

clipped from blog.ted.com

Louise Leakey is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity’s past in East Africa. In 2001, Leakey and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, the 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, at Lake Turkana -- the same region where her father, Richard, discovered the "Turkana Boy" fossil, and near Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leakey, discovered the bones of Homo habilis.

In August 2007 Louise and Meave, both National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, dug up new H. habilis bones that may rewrite humanity's evolutionary timeline. We imagine that we evolved from apes in an orderly progression from ape to hominid to human, but the Leakeys' find suggests that different species of pre-humans actually lived side by side at the same time for almost half a million years.

clipped from techshop.ws

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