Quite fascinating—expecially the ones where the avatar is like an altered version of the original person, rather than entirely different.

I didn’t know there was a name for this. It’s the theoretical maximim number of people for whom it’s possible to know “who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person”. Though I don’t see how it can be a specific number, since it will surely vary from person to person.

Listening to their own language, people with dyslexia did worse at recognising different voices. Listening to an unfamiliar language, there was no difference between people with and without dyslexia. The researchers theorise that this is to do with how the brain processes phonemes (the basic units of sound in a language).

We may have evolved not to argue rationally, but to find arguments which will persuade others of our point of view.

From Science Daily, August 5th, 2009. Experiments with artificial “out of body” experiences which are surprisingly simple to produce. Researchers “investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a “virtual” body is seen.”