Does the audio say "Yanny" or "Laurel"?

The difference between just about everyone in my life... and me:
"Some people are willingly blind to metaphor, viewing each example as a special case. Others manage to connect the dots and find what they need just about anywhere."

changing-beliefs = Not that this article is talking about changing beliefs, per se, but how our beliefs get modified over time without us even noticing it (i.e. our current reality turns into the future by taking forms we already recognize)

Note that this happened a day after the llama issue, which honestly, I didn't even follow. Just keep in mind that the llama story which is linked to in this article) was a news item for 2015. .................... Followup to end the debate: http://mashable.com/2015/02/26/dress-white-gold-blue-black/

It's not whether there IS a favorite. It's whether or not the kids THINK there is. "In his study, he found that in families that were close-knit, with good relationships and not a lot of fighting, there was less effect from perceived inequality. "In families like that there's really no link between kids' perception and their behavior," Jensen says. So as long as you love and respect all your kids, Jensen says, the fact that you like one a wee bit more won't matter."

Computer screen can't show you yellow, so it shows you a mix of red and green.

The title says it all: Men are seen as whole, while women are seen as a collection of parts.

Everything is relative.

I've said this a billion times and I will say it again and again and again: Everything is a variable waiting to be tweaked. People don't realize that seemingly small changes affect the way things get perceived and how people react to them. It's just like that time Charles Rawls said that he had a friend who has studied how wording in surveys affects the answers people give. If you phrase things a certain way or present them with a sliding scale instead of a fill in the blank, answers change - sometimes in dramatic ways.

ideas-stolen = I always thought about this as a kid: "That means people learn the names of colors — what kinds of experiences to call yellow or blue — and they could talk forever about colors and never disagree. Yet inside their heads, it could all be very different."

People become more racist during tough times.

If this one disappears, it's also at: http://imgur.com/gallery/5PowFZI ------------ or ---------- http://imgur.com/gallery/tGmV5

"We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. Language actually makes the world in which we live."

"Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right."

The Phuc Tran talk is about the subjunctive and the advantages & drawbacks it gives us when thinking about the future or how things "might have been."

For these links that are tagged with language+perception, note that a few links with closely related phenomenon are bookmarked under language+vision.

cognitive-load, perception = "Do you know why they ply you with samples at warehouse stores? Because exciting your mouth–literally making you drool–makes you spend more money not just on food, but on everything." Interpretation... Our brain's limited capacity confuses one "want" (hunger/food) for another "want" (product)

"In a rowing team study, team mates of a fellow crew member who was perceived to be a ‘slacker’ who did not pull his weight, was uniformly rated as physically ugly and another team member with an excellent work ethic was uniformly rated as physically attractive. The difference in perceived physical attractiveness did not exist for raters who knew nothing about the contributions of the two men to the team."

books-to-buy = “Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind.” ................... Mirrors next to elevators so people have something to do (check themselves out) while they wait for the elevators. Same thing with with the baggage claim being a 20 minute walk away from the airplane (people who walk 20 minutes instead of wait 20 minutes, report being happier about the experience even though it was more work.) ...which is the same reason doctor's offices (McDoctors, like Summit Medical) schedule you for 3:30pm and call you in from the waiting room at 3:30pm, but leave you waiting in the examination room for another 15-20 minutes.

Also see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013c8tb
Reminds me of a Science Channel special called "Do You See What I See" where they had a bunch of interesting segments on perception. One in particular was a color test administered to indigenous native Africans or something. They couldn't distinguish between green and blue because their language used the same word for both colors... but on the flip side, they were able to distinguish between two VERY similar shades of green because in their language, those two shades had different names.

Scientists also said the reason they could distinguish green from green is because it's important in their daily life (i.e. as a farmer a certain green might indicate disease or lack of water vs another green indicating vitality.) So vision is not absolute, rather a function of LANGUAGE and NEED.
They also called the sky "black" which is interesting...

NOTE: Unrelated, but also why wine tasting needs to be trained and given a language to describe it.

"We are surrounded by Nothing. Everywhere we go, we have no idea what we're not seeing. We don't know what gravitational fields look like, what dark matter looks like, what quantum foam looks like, what de Kooning's drawing looked like, but what the scientists and the artists are telling us, in their very different ways, is that if we lean in, and pay very close attention, sometimes what looks like Nothing is the best place to find the most interesting...somethings."

This and other similar examples: "There are doctors in China who believe it is their job to keep you healthy. So any month you are healthy, you pay them. Any month you are sick, you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job." The book is "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer.

I had this idea (and still have ideas for a men's clothing line) at least 2009 or earlier.

Also see links tagged with language+vision ............................. "Each language organizes and describes the future differently. Linguists call this distinction future-time-reference (FTR, for short). Some languages, like German, have a weak-FTR, which means that the distinction between today and tomorrow isn’t very concrete. In his paper, Chen gives the example that in German, you can say, “It rains tomorrow” whereas in English you have to say, “It will rain tomorrow.” English is a strong-FTR language because there are clear, constant grammatical distinctions between today and tomorrow. Analyzing retirement savings’ patterns, along with health habits, Chen found that people who speak weak-FTR languages prepare more thoroughly for the future than people who speak strong-FTR languages. In fact, weak-FTR countries save, on average, 6% more of their GDP every year. They also smoke less, exercise more, and are less likely to be overweight."

URL no longer works. Changed to: http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107/Introduction/BehindScene/StepBehindScene107.html