Jerry Seinfeld Interview: How to Write a Joke | The New York Times

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Serotonin

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Social rivalry is part of life for mammals because they live in groups. Reptiles live alone, so they can lunge at attractive food and mating opportunities without worrying about what others will do. If group-living mammals lunged, some would get hurt. Instead, natural selection built a brain that promotes survival by comparing itself to others before acting. When a mammal sees itself as weaker than those around it, cortisol is released (the chemical we know as the "stress hormone") and impulses are restrained. When a brain sees itself as stronger, serotonin is released and it feels safe to act. The good feeling of serotonin is a great motivator for mammals. Serotonin paves the neural pathways that wire a mammal to expect more in ways that worked before. Cortisol wires a mammal to expect harm from things that triggered it before. Alas, a mammal can't easily avoid stronger members of its herd or pack or troop because isolated individuals are quickly picked off b...
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Culture today (work in progress)

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I grew up during postmodernism, the time after modernism when culture questioned modernism's search for truth and meaning, instead embracing multiple meanings and perspectives.  But I've been trying to figure out where we are now. While architecture has moved onto parametricism, society is for sure in the digital age, but the digital age doesn't really describe the culture as much as material situation. I'm beginning to see how society has been effected by the digital age (or how it has changed in general), and it seems to be some kind of almost fractured pre-modernism. With information being so easily and widely spread by anyone, so many ideas and worldviews that would have been remained fringe in the past have been able to gain major traction. The ideas of postmodernism seem to have been a highpoint in intellectual thought, and that traditional is carried forth by fewer and fewer, but it seems cultural and intellectual progress has receded in favor of technological pr...
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