All posts tagged: Sagan

Eye Movement Therapies, Purple Hats, and the Sagan Standard

Eye Movement Therapies, Purple Hats, and the Sagan Standard

Published by skeptic

Editor’s note: Gerald Rosen and Gerald Davison coined the term purple hat therapy as a metaphor for treatment packages such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) that combine essential elements (cognitive and behavioral techniques) and nonessential elements (eye movements). Wikipedia now has a page dedicated to this concept. In the 1980s, several novel psychotherapeutic techniques were proposed for the rapid cure of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the forefront of these “power therapies” was Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a method developed by Francine Shapiro (1948–2019) and still commonly used today. Shapiro reported a 100 percent success rate treating trauma memories with multi-saccadic eye movements, and she assured clinicians who read her report that they could use eye movements to “achieve complete desensitization of 75–80% of any individually treated trauma-related memory in a single 50-minute session” (Shapiro 1989, 221). Shapiro then offered workshops that introduced her treatment to thousands of clinicians. Over time, EMDR came to enjoy the sun of scientific endorsement. We offer a less than sanguine view of EMDR, believing that …

Carl Sagan in 1986: ‘Voyager has become a new kind of intelligent being—part robot, part human’

Carl Sagan in 1986: ‘Voyager has become a new kind of intelligent being—part robot, part human’

Published by skeptic

One of the worries that kept legendary astronomer Carl Sagan up at night was whether aliens would understand us. In the mid-1970s, Sagan led a committee formed by NASA to assemble a collection of images, recorded greetings, and music to represent Earth. The montage was pressed onto golden albums and dispatched across the cosmos on the backs of Voyagers 1 and 2. In a 1986 story Sagan wrote for Popular Science, he noted that “hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world,” which meant they likely wouldn’t be able to decipher the golden discs. But he took assurance from an underappreciated dimension of Voyagers’ message: the designs of the vessels themselves. “We are tool makers,” Sagan wrote. “This is a fundamental aspect, and perhaps the essence, of being human.” What better way to tell alien civilizations that Earthlings are toolmakers than by sending a living room-sized, aluminum-framed probe clear across the Milky Way.  Although both spacecraft were only designed to swing by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2’s trajectory also …

NYC-based actor Sagan Chen stays on the move with Lenovo’s Legion Go

NYC-based actor Sagan Chen stays on the move with Lenovo’s Legion Go

Published by skeptic

For many of us, gaming isn’t just about pushing pixels on a screen. Gaming has been a significant part of my life since childhood, serving as both a source of entertainment and an opportunity to navigate challenges in a different context. And when I can’t make it to the boxing gym to shake off the day’s stress, gaming offers a therapeutic relief where I can immerse myself, temporarily leaving behind the pressures of life to come back with a clearer mind.  As a New York City-based actor, filmmaker, and theater artist who doesn’t work a steady 9-5 job, I’m constantly on the go, bouncing from auditions to gigs to screenings. Lucky for me, my line of work sometimes takes me to different corners of the map. This weekend, I brought the Legion Go with me on an impromptu trip to LA. I’ve clocked plenty of hours playing on different consoles and was excited to dip my toes into the PC gaming world — without dropping dough on all the gear needed for a desktop setup.  …

Sagan undergoes heart procedure in Italy

Sagan undergoes heart procedure in Italy

Published by skeptic

Three-time world road champion Peter Sagan underwent a heart procedure on Friday after suffering a tachycardic episode during a recent mountain bike race in Spain. The Slovakian rider suffered an abnormally high heart rate in a mountain bike race in Valencia at the weekend and was treated on Friday in Ancona, Italy. Sagan, 34, retired from road cycling last year but is still focussed on qualifying for the Paris Olympics in cross country. “Hello guys, just a brief update. Everything is under control and in just a few days I’ll be back on my bike,” Sagan said in a post on Instagram. A medical report from the Marche University Hospital said an internal electrophysiological study was carried out and that “a subcutaneous event recorder was implanted which will allow the future monitoring of the athlete.” Sagan had already competed in two mountain bike events this year as he seeks to earn UCI points in order to help Slovakia qualify for the competition in the Olympics. He was scheduled to compete in the UCI World Cup …

Threading the Freethought Lives of Hitchens and Sagan

Threading the Freethought Lives of Hitchens and Sagan

Published by Sam

“Humans have limitations, and no one knows this better than scientists. But a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a “spirit world” than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.” —Carl Sagan, 1995 December is a time for remembrance. We connect to others while simultaneously taking stock of another year gone by. A turn of the calendar. Perhaps some more wrinkles and a few more gray hairs. We scroll though celebrity deaths, ongoing political shenanigans, follow the latest natural disaster, or crisis, or war with angst for the future. Maybe we also focus on love and kindness if we’re eternal optimists as …

Carl Sagan detected life on Earth 30 years ago – here’s how his experiment is helping us search for alien species today

Carl Sagan detected life on Earth 30 years ago – here’s how his experiment is helping us search for alien species today

Published by skeptic

It’s been 30 years since a group of scientists led by Carl Sagan found evidence for life on Earth using data from instruments on board the Nasa Galileo robotic spacecraft. Yes, you read that correctly. Among his many pearls of wisdom, Sagan was famous for saying that science is more than a body of knowledge – it is a way of thinking. In other words, how humans go about the business of discovering new knowledge is at least as important as the knowledge itself. In this vein, the study was an example of a “control experiment” – a critical part of the scientific method. This can involve asking whether a given study or method of analysis is capable of finding evidence for something we already know. Suppose one were to fly past Earth in an alien spacecraft with the same instruments on board as Galileo had. If we knew nothing else about Earth, would we be able to unambiguously detect life here, using nothing but these instruments (which wouldn’t be optimised to find it)? If …