Monkeys reason about their own thoughts, know self-doubt

Via HuffPo’s Joanna Zelman: Apparently humans aren’t the only ones filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. A recent study found that certain monkeys question their own thinking as well. Professor John David Smith and Michael Beran trained macaques, which are of the Old World group (native to Africa, Asia, and Europe), to play a computer game [...]

Reverse-engineering beauty

Denis Dutton theorizes on the Pleistocene origin of our aesthetic sense at TED; illustrations by Andrew Park:    Here is a brief interview Dutton conducted with Jorge Louis Borges, unrelated to anything discussed in the lecture. Why link it, then? Because of rational beings, one sort is divine, one is human, and another is such [...]