The monk dipped his quill and positioned it over the parchment again. His fingers were black and smudges formed on the unyielding page. Drops of ink found their way to the frayed cuff of his robe. “How can I be expected to do this!” he said. “What task has the Abbot set you now?” I asked. “I’ve been told to pen…More
Tag Archives: emotion
Social media help you to believe what you want to believe
The Scottish referendum on independence has helped expose something we knew all along about what it is to have an opinion. Some of us are good at filtering out the evidence we would rather not see, and accepting only what supports our beliefs. In an article in The Times yesterday, journalist Hugo Rifkind identified the current mood of the so-called…More
Where does happiness happen?
Where is the love? asked Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway back in 1972 (and The Black-Eyed Peas in 2009). It’s really a complaint — you offered me love but it never came. Where can you find love, happiness, anger, grief? It’s only a slightly different question: Where do emotions happen anyway? Here are some candidates. 1. It’s in our heads. The…More
Emotional words
Early last year Facebook introduced the option of tagging your status updates with an indication of how you feel. You select from a menu to indicate if you are happy, bored, irritated — that kind of thing — and there’s a smiley that goes with each feeling. It was introduced as a trial, but is…More
Mood and movement (and trams)
The trams are running in Edinburgh, after 6 years of construction, stalls and turmoil. It’s a nice ride, described well in a recent post by blogger Gillean Somerville-Arjat: “It doesn’t shoogle or wobble and hurtle you about with sudden braking as the buses do.” I think of gliding down Princes Street on a tram as something like being in a…More
How bored is your dog?
People have tried EEG on pumpkins, melons and dead fish. There’s no real evidence that it works on dogs, but it was worth a try. The dominant reading for Jasmine was excitement. This blog post is co-written with PhD student Dorothea Kalogianni. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a fascinating technology that measures the intensities of the key frequencies at which the human…More
Moody atmospheres and electric auras
How do buildings affect people emotionally? Most architects prefer to talk of atmosphere rather than emotion. For architectural theorist Mark Wigley, atmosphere: “surrounds a building, clinging to the material object.” He says it even emanates from the building: “It is some kind of sensuous emission of sound, light, heat, smell, and moisture; a swirling climate of intangible effects…More
Wet and wild
In a recent experiment into green landscapes and their salutogenic (health giving) potential (led by colleague Jenny Roe), we presented people with a range of images of urban and green space — dry images deliberately selected without “blue space” (i.e. water). Such is homo sapiens‘ powerful affinity with life-giving water, we thought its presence would…More
Betwixt and between
Architecture is not a polite discipline. According to architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi, “the ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act; where limits are perverted, and prohibitions are transgressed. The starting point of architecture is distortion” (91). Rem Koolhaas asserts something similar. Design is not “meticulous definition, the imposition…More
Frequent feelings
In my research into emotions I’ve found it useful to look at Google search counts to gauge the relative popularity of terms like happiness, melancholy, and mood. Now Google provide n-grams, which show the occurrences of words (or any string of characters) during any year in the entire corpus of books that Google have scanned…More