June Ashby
Writes for the wisst team about the mind, words, ideas and art.
- The Great Wave owes its blue to a pigment from BerlinHokusai's Great Wave is one of the best-known images from Japan. Its deep, lasting blue was a recent import from Europe, first made in Berlin more than a century earlier.
- The trolley problem began with a tram driverThe runaway trolley is the best-known dilemma in ethics. It comes from a 1967 paper by Philippa Foot about abortion, and her question was not quite the one people ask now.
- How a napron became an apronSome everyday English words exist because people heard the boundary between two words in the wrong place. Apron, adder, umpire and nickname all got their shape this way.
- Why you can't tickle yourselfTickle your own palm and almost nothing happens. Experiments with a pair of robots in London showed why: the brain predicts the touch it is about to cause and turns it down.
- Why the middle of a list slips awayRead someone a list of words and ask what they remember. The first few and the last few come back; the middle mostly doesn't. A 1962 study mapped the shape.
- The theft that made the Mona Lisa world-famousIn August 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. For more than two years it stayed in the news, and visitors came to stare at the empty space on the wall.
- If you replace every plank, is it still the same ship?The Athenians kept repairing Theseus's ship until none of the original wood was left. Philosophers have argued about what that means ever since.
- Nice used to mean foolishOver seven centuries, nice went from ignorant to fussy to precise to pleasant. It isn't alone: silly, awful, knight and deer have all wandered far from where they started.
- We tend to like what we've seen beforeShow people a foreign character or a stranger's face a few more times, and they start to rate it more kindly. Robert Zajonc called this the mere exposure effect.
- The man who memorised nonsense to measure forgettingIn the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus learned lists of meaningless syllables and timed how fast they slipped away. Along the way he found a cheaper way to keep them.
- Michelangelo's David was carved from a block others gave up onThe marble for the David had been started, set aside and left lying for years before Michelangelo took it on at 26. It was meant for somewhere it never went.
- The three-page paper that broke the definition of knowledgeKnowing something seemed to mean having a true belief with good reasons. In 1963 Edmund Gettier showed, with two short stories, that this isn't enough.
- Why English vowels don't sound like their lettersBetween about 1400 and 1700, the long vowels of English moved. Spelling was settling at the same time, and it stayed where the sounds used to be.
- The willpower battery that didn't replicateFor years psychology taught that self-control runs down like a battery. Then dozens of labs ran the same test the same way, and the effect all but vanished.
- Reading is a habit you can't switch offSay the ink colour of the word RED printed in blue, and you slow down. A 1935 experiment measured by how much, and the result has held up ever since.