'Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn't mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid. Instead, the amygdala seems to be doing something more subtle: processing events that are related to what a person cares about at the moment. So if you're in a scary situation or have an anxious personality, the amygdala might be activated by a frightening image. But hungry people have increased amygdala activity in response to pictures of food and people who are very empathetic have an amygdala response to seeing other people. "When we're studying emotion, people want to find specific brain parts that are associated with different emotions," Cunningham says. Especially in the early days of neuroscience, scientists hoped that soon it would be possible to use MRI and other brain-imaging techniques "to get under the hood and find out what people are really thinking." A lot of the time, people really don't know, or won't say, what they're thinking, and it would be nice to be able to look at a picture of their brain and know the answer. But the brain is too complicated for that. "Emotion is going to be distributed across the brain," Cunningham says.'

'#3. Normopathy: A person who is normotic is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing exactly what is expected by society. #4. Abjection: ...every human goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first realize that our bodies are separate from our parents' bodies – this sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the boundaries of our sense of self. #6. Repetition compulsion: ...the urge to do something again and again. #10. Group feeling: ...there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group – these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings. Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal feelings. A group feeling can only come about through membership in a group, and isn't something that you would ever have on your own.'

"She a made a sound. It was really embarrassing."

'"This is the holy grail of artificial intelligence," said project director Kate Tillman, explaining that the robot instantly performs millions of computations to ensure feelings of unresolved anger and simmering resentment remain deeply buried within its complex circuitry. "We felt we were on the right track when we brought up a personal shortcoming and it paced around the lab muttering, but when it started breaking eye contact and changing the subject, we knew we had accomplished something revolutionary."'

'The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us. -- You get angry not when someone hurts you, but when their actions betray a setting of their cooperation dial that is lower than you expect, and your anger is both a threat to turn down your own dial and an inducement to them to turn theirs up. You show gratitude not when someone benefits you, but when their dial is set higher than you expect, and this signals that you plan to turn yours up in response.'

"People don't buy what you do they buy WHY you do it and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe."

'...Marsh and her colleagues have been exploring how “callous and unemotional” individuals tend to show a very specific cognitive deficit: namely, they are especially poor at recognizing, processing and responding normally to the facial expression of fear on other people’s faces (a “normal” response being ceasing an assault on the frightened person or offering aid). Curiously, their trouble in this area is not due to a problem with facial expressions in general—they do perfectly well deciphering the look of disgust, anger, happiness and so on on other people’s faces. ...it’s only the look of fear that puzzles diagnosably antisocial people (and to a somewhat lesser extent, sadness).'

'"Zoloft is most commonly prescribed for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders, but it would be ridiculous to limit such a multi-functional drug to these few uses," Pfizer spokesman Jon Pugh said. "We feel doctors need to stop asking their patients if anything is wrong and start asking if anything could be more right." -- In today's fast-paced world, Vernon said, people don't have time to deal with mood changes. "Zoloft has always helped clinically depressed people modulate serotonin levels and other chemical imbalances that make life unlivable for them," Vernon said. "But now, Zoloft can also help anyone who needs their emotions leveled off. Do you find yourself feeling excited or sad? No one should have to suffer through those harrowing peaks and valleys."' -- One pill to rule them all

'An emotion tracking system has been patented by Sony; it detects laughter and other emotions in media consumers. The application picks up on metadata, which includes laughter recorded by the microphone and a user’s expression from the camera. Both devices are linked to a “game console”, shown as a PlayStation 3 in the diagram, which identifies the user, notes emotions, and transfers the data over a network.'

'“The Cybraphon has an almost egotistical desire for fame,” says Simon Kirby, one of the creators of the robot. When the needle hits rapture, the Cybraphon’s built-in orchestra of mechanized acoustic instruments clang in harmony to belt out an upbeat tune. But without online attention it slips into dejection and spews out a sad melody. Kirby says the Cybraphon is devised as a “tongue-in-cheek comment on people’s obsession with online celebrity.” And it is almost Julia Allison-esque in its quest for attention. The device scours the web all day looking for mentions of itself and tracking how many friends it has on Facebook and MySpace. But no matter how much attention the Cybraphon gets, it always eventually slips into depression, says Kirby. That means online attention could cheer up the Cybraphon in the short term but once the initial excitement dies down, the robot is disillusioned. “We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band,” he says.'

'Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking. If there are no gaps there is no emotion. Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/language) for emotion. When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/industrial/financial/fast visuals/fast words) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing. There comes a time when there are almost no gaps. People become incapable of experiencing/tolerating gaps. Emotion ends. Man becomes machine. -- #A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression/Anxiety. #A (travelling) society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression/Anxiety. #A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression/Anxiety.' -- So true.

'... the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb. -- ...patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.' -- Neurosecurity, barrier mazes, ghost hacks, oh my!

On the internet: his views on its impact, its potential, and what it has come to represent. -- "The new realism will be something that geniunely reflects to people their experience of the world which is complicated, ambiguous, that we are alone in the world..." -- "Facebook is just a victorian public world reinvented, but it's not the new television because it doesn't tell us stories, and people's experience doesn't tell us stories. Our job is take people's experience and make things out of them which then those individuals will go 'Oh, that's fascinating, it responds to me, I feel that's real but it takes me beyond myself.' -- In our world of individualism, the things that people are really concerned about are being trapped by their own feelings: there is growing sense that people want to know whether their feelings are real, if their feelings are right or wrong, do other people feel these feelings? They want to be taken out of themselves and taken into other emotional dimensions."'

'If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works. Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.” Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works. “In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”'

'“Mindfulness is based on Eastern philosophy,” said Dr. Irene. “For us in the West, it’s the ‘new kid’ on the block.” Rather than dealing with thinking, mindfulness addresses problems in psychological function that occur because painful emotions are avoided. Again, patients are not aware of avoiding their feelings, but the objective of therapy is to “help the person experience all emotions ? especially negative ones ? in the here and now.” Emotions are viewed as a normal and inevitable part of life. Avoidance of emotions leads to more avoidance, more symptoms, and a tendency to “wallow in pain instead of moving on to the next moment and the next feeling life brings.'

'..."without words for emotions". Typical deficiencies may include problems identifying, describing, and working with one's own feelings, often marked by a lack of understanding of the feelings of others; difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal; confusion of physical sensations often associated with emotions; few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination; and concrete, realistic, logical thinking, often to the exclusion of emotional responses to problems. In general, these individuals lack imagination, intuition, empathy, and drive-fulfillment fantasy, especially in relation to objects. Instead, they seem oriented toward things and even treat themselves as robots. ...the disaffected individual had at some point "experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity," to which they applied psychological defenses to pulverize and eject all emotional representations from consciousness.'

'Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. Benzon says: "My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood."' -- Findings from the "Sarah Cole" study: 'When angry one thinks forward from a slight or injustice towards possibilities of what to do about it, including possibilities of vengeance. When sad, one backtracks mentally from the loss or mistake to what might have caused it.' -- And it should be precisely the reverse.

'... to me, story is a tool, but not the goal of video games. In the past, when you say "entertainment" – I mean, we care about entertainment more than story – so "entertainment" in a sentence, basically, it's food for feeling. -- And then, even for visual media, like animation or movies, it's just right now the most popular genre uses narrative structure, but you've seen experimental movies and animations which have nothing to do with story, but are really intriguing to watch, and make you feel a certain way. -- And also me, myself, I am not a native speaker. If I really want to write good dialogue, I would be shooting myself in the foot. So I talk a lot about why I am making games like this. ...so I'm going to pick the most global feeling. The things that cross culture, and gender, and age, that everybody can relate to, and work them into games.'

Increasing emotional bandwidth.

'The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). -- ... positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak. -- "It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved."'

"A modified Roomba tries to detect, and avoid, stressed-out users. ...a headband reads bioelectrical signals to a humble floor-cleaning Roomba. The headband, which is sold as a gaming device, detects muscle tension in the wearer's face, so the researchers were able to directly control the Roomba's speed by, for example, clenching their jaws or tensing their eyebrows. They also developed a somewhat crude way to evaluate a person's emotional state, based on facial muscle tension (the more tension, the more stress), and programmed the Roomba to respond. If a person exhibited high stress, the Roomba continued cleaning but moved away from the user... a robot designed to provide comfort could instinctively approach a person who is feeling particularly sad or stressed." -- And then the mind comes to depend upon the expressions of machine to know what it should be feeling.

On solsastalgia: "the homesickness one feels not when one moves away, but when one’s home environment vanishes before one’s eyes." -- "...now that economic hard times are here, more online worlds are dying, and here’s the interesting thing: They’re realizing that they owe it to their long-time players to make it into a sort of event. Game designers are realizing that ending their world in a dramatically satisfying way is actually a very interesting logistical, ludogical, and emotional trick. In essence, we’re slowly seeing the emergence of eschatology as a design challenge."

'You don't have to quietly mutter "anger" in order to feel anger. But it does suggest that anger is a concept that you begin learning in infancy and may continue to extend and revise throughout life. The repeated experience of labeling a combination of core affect and the context in which it occurs as "anger" trains you in how to be angry and how to recognize anger. Barrett describes emotions as simulations, in the sense that they take an experience of core affect, plus the situation in which it occurs, and compute an appropriate result. This suggests that we can revise our emotional architecture through experiments in description. [Lisa Feldman Barrett's] paper suggests that we can improve our emotional structure, increasing the granularity of emotional experiences by enriching our vocabulary and learning to apply it to previously unnoticed patterns in affect and context.'

"Right now, with the cooperation of desperate people, scientists could be using CaMKII to erase their old lives. Then they'll just need to implant new personalities and emotions."

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

"Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

"... children and seniors develop philosophical positions that are inseparable from their emotional needs. Affect and cognition wok together in the subjective response to relational technologies." -- "Orelia wants the kind of love that only a living creature can provide. She fears the ability of any creature to behave 'as if' it could love. She denied a chilly emotional reality by attributing qualities of intuition, transparency and connectedness to all people and animals. A philosophical position about robots is linked to an experience of the machine-like qualities of which people are capable, a good example of the interdependence of philosophical position and psychological motivation." -- "Relational artifacts, as objects between the living and not living, may have some special. As one nursing home resident said about Paro: 'I don't care if he is real or not. I love him."

'We are ill prepare for the new psychological world we are creating. We make objects that are emotionally powerful; at the same time, we say things such as "technology is just a tool" that deny the power our creations both on us as individuals and on our culture. I find it amazing how in less than one generation people have gotten used to the idea of giving their children Ritalin–not because the childen are hyperactive but because it will enhance their performance in school. who are you, anyway–your unmedicated self or your Ritalin self? for a lot of people, it has become unproblematic that their self is their self with Ritalin or their self with the addiction of a Web connection as an extension of mind. As one student with a wearable computer with a 24-hour Internet connection put it, "I become my computer. It's not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I'm a better person."'

'... no matter how attentive its owner, Tamagotchis either died or sprouted wings after a couple of weeks or so, often prompting gloom and guilt. Furbys evoked similar emotions. "I would rush over to the house with a new Furby, and every single time, the child showed no interest in the new one." Ms Audley recalled. "They gave lots of indications that they felt betrayed, taken in and fooled. It had revealed its nature as a machine and they felt embarrassed and angry. They were totally unwilling to invest that kind of emotional relationship in an object again." -- And what about creatures that seem to be alive but immortal? Professor Turkle said one woman told her hat Aibo was better than a real dog because it would not die suddenly and plunge its owner into grief. The comment startled Professor Turkle... "The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents potentially dramatic changes in our psychology."

'The boy's experience of early separation and loss is traumatic. It leads to a strong desire to control his environment. Male separation from others is about differentiation but also autonomy, 'the wish to gain control over the sources and object of pleasure in order to shore up possibilities for happiness against the risk of disappointment and loss' (Gilligan 1982, 46) Women grow up differently... women look look to affection, relationships, responsibility and caring for a community of others... Carol Gilligan talks about 'the hierarchy and the web' as metaphors to describe the different ways in which men and women see their worlds. Men see a hierarchy of autonomous positions. Women see a web of interconnections between people. Men want to be alone at the top; they fear being too far out on the edge. Men can be with the computer and still be alone, separate and autonomous. When women perceive this technology as demanding separation, it is experienced as alien and dangerous.'

"Eliza had a strong emotional effect on many who used it. Weizenbaum was surprised that his students were eager to chat with the program and some even wanted to be alone with it. What made Eliza a valued interlocutor? What matters were so private that they could only be discussed with a machine? Eliza not only revealed people's willingness to talk to computers but their reluctance to talk to other people. Students' trust in Eliza did not speak to what they thought Eliza would understand but their lack of trust in the people who would understand. Relational artifacts have become evocative objects, object that clarify our relationships to the world and ourselves. People who meet these objects feel a desire to nurture them. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. People begin to care for these objects and want the objects to care about them."

'Probably the saddest part is the children. They're all over the place, and your encounters with them are frequently incredibly depressing. Witnessing anybody caught in an apocalypse is tragic, but seeing a child in such situations tends to amplify one's sense of injustice. The best works of tragedy seek to inspire that punched-in-the-gut feeling. I don't read George Orwell's 1984 or Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- or view Goya's The Disasters of War -- so that I can feel warm and fuzzy. The point is to trigger reflection through pain: At its best, Fallout 3 makes you think about the consequences of war.'

"We’re looking for short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between — inseparably tied to a specific place in London."

"You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You're in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It's a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your "wife" and you earn double the points for every step you take. If you're like most people, you'll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness. At least I won't be alone. Somebody loves me. Ha-ha-ha... Then -- thwack -- she dies."

"#Player-created content: ...It is natural for an individual to wish to share the fruit of his creativity, thereby rising from obscurity. Once tasted, the reward of creation often becomes an irresistible need... give power to the players, and they will take over your game... creation becomes the game. #The aging of players: Older gamers will increasingly hold a greater interest in themes that are presently uncommon or poorly developed, such as economic or political simulations. They will assign a greater importance to game-generated emotions and moral dilemmas... [they] will have a harder time becoming immersed in less believable plots or universes. #The emergence of emotions: ...powerful emotions, such as compassion or love are very rarely touched upon. Older players will likely be the first to fully appreciate this emotional dimension of gaming, since it connects with their own life experience; we are, after all, far more sensitive to emotions we have felt before."

"Paro is a therapeutic robot baby harp seal, intended to have a calming effect on and elicit emotional responses in patients of hospitals and nursing homes, similar to Animal-Assisted Therapy, but without its negative aspects. The robot has tactile sensors and responds to petting by moving its tail and opening and closing its eyes. It also responds to sounds and can learn a name. It can show emotions such as surprise, happiness and anger. It produces sounds similar to a real baby seal and (unlike a real baby seal) is active during the day and goes to sleep at night."

'Paro (a robotic seal-like creative) is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is treated. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." and then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself. The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computation objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. They are potent objects-to-think-with for asking the questions, posed by all machines that tether us to new socialities: "What is an authentic relationship with a machine?" "What are machines doing to our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship?"'

“For kids [the mobile phone] has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object.” MS. TURKLE, the M.I.T. professor, says cellphones offer another way for the Facebook generation to share every life experience the second it unfolds. “There is a slippage from ‘I have a feeling I want to make a call’ to ‘I need to make a call,’ ” she said. “You don’t get to have a feeling before sharing that feeling anymore.”'

'Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor... ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”' -- Pron.

"It works by flashing subliminal images such as photos of Osama Bin Laden and words like 'Islamic Jihad' printed in Arabic which are supposed to stimulate an involuntary emotional response that could flag you as a high-risk passenger. Factors such as body temperature, heart-rate and respiration will be measured, often without you realising you're being monitored." -- FFS

Gesture recognition interface for Second Life: "Recognizes the following attitudes: #Yes/No head motion #Surprise/smile #Left/right head bending"

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives: The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it. #2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either: The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. #4. Online company only makes us lonelier: When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? ... in Text World, all that is stripped away... absent a sense of the other person's mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. #5. We don't get criticized enough. #7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less: There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.'

'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects ... play ... on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'

"... children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to nurture, that might nurture them. How are we going to feel when our computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what interests me now."

"Where you find people building relationships, sharing day-to-day experiences, teaching each other what they've learned about the world... - those are the places that thrive. Those are the places that people live in."

"Blending strategies from the arts, design, engineering and psychology, Aerial offers the design and production of intriguing interactive electromechanical installations, sculptures and rides; and the curating and staging of engaging events."

“When they developed databases, the recordings were nothing like the way emotion appears in everyday action and interaction, and the codes they used to describe the recording would not fit the things that happen in everyday life.” -- Way round wrong!

"The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights point of high and low arousal."

"The instant you die [in Halo], the game shifts to a third-person camera perspective. This sudden switch in camera angle [...] is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences."

"In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond."

On the game, Passage: "There have been a number of people who have written stuff about this being the first videogame to make them cry."

EEG game/simulation controller

"In Audiosurf, you race down a futuristic and colorful highway... the traffic patterns, and the scenery are all synchronized to the music you have chosen ... and can compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favorite songs." Way cool!

'Apparently, KC has trademarked "let it out." And this is proof that the corporation and marketing still has a lot to learn.'

"Build something cool with our data! - Emotional Cities offers open access to key parts of the mood data repository and user community via our API."

"This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. In addition to the EMV score, You will find out which emotion inside your customer's your headline most impacts: #Intellectual #Empathetic #Spiritual"

'"When the waiter told us the specials, I made that face :P - not on purpose of course - because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said: 'Did you just make an IM face?' "'

"as the role of the medical industry and medical professional is shifting from curing health impairments to providing enhancements... there is a clear opportunity for new fields of enhancement counseling, customizing and habituation training to develop."

(^.^) (;.;) (-.-) (_ _) (^.^;) *^.^* (=.=) (*.*) (@.@) (>.<) (d.b) (~_~) (^_^)

" I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers :-) "

"Galvanic skin response (GSR), also known as electrodermal response (EDR), psychogalvanic reflex (PGR), or skin conductance response (SCR), is a method of measuring the electrical resistance of the skin."

"...often situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives... cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process."

Video: Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web.. he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around.. he presents "We Feel Fine" a project that scours blogs to collect the planet's emotions"

"When you connect to your audience's emotions and give them a way to share their enthusiasm through social networks, your brand will benefit with results at the cash register."

On Kyle's Academy: "These misgivings have made no dent in the public's appetite for emotionally raw media, though, as evidenced by the booming sales of "misery memoirs" and magazines peddling personal trauma tales and in the explosion of psychological TV"

An exploration of human emotion, in six movements