andrewducker | Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-5-2009

Artists illustrate their favourite writers

I rather like the Michael Chabon one.

(tags: illustration art literature comics authors)
What roleplaying combat can be like.

(tags: games roleplaying funny)
People believe that God believes whatever they do.

The team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian. In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.

(tags: religion psychology science god morality research)
Ask Carole, our Evolutionary Agony Aunt

I laughed a _lot_.

(tags: funny evolution genetics relationships)

Very cool, if true