Recent Feeds + Reads

Yes, our traditional Flavorpill end-of-year stereotyping exercise is back — we’ve collected 50 albums that keep appearing on various best-of lists around the Internet, along with the sort of people who like said albums. As ever, our obligatory disclaimer: this is a lighthearted exercise, so don’t get all pissy about it — and, yes, our stereotype is on here, and it fits perfectly. Go on, see if you can guess which one it is.

Here’s a selection of albums that I’ve heard or want to hear:

Jack White — Blunderbuss
People who didn’t think The Raconteurs were lame at all.

The Raconteurs are great! And Jack White is awesome!

Leonard Cohen &mdash Old Ideas
The elderly guy in your family that all your friends think is way cool.

Animal Collective — Centipede Hz
Bug-eyed trippers whose cognitive faculties are now starting to suffer a noticeable decline.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor — ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
Thirtysomethings who have been wearing the same thrift shop cardigan for a decade.

Tame Impala — Lonerism
The dude with shaggy long hair who stands in front of you at every concert.

David Byrne and St. Vincent — Love This Giant
Grad students who spend more time in the library than at concerts.

The xx — Coexist
Interior designers who buy one record a year.

The human fascination with color never ceases to amaze me. Our perceptual experience is filled with shapes and pitches and textures and timbres and depths and on and on, yet color seems to get the lion share of our excitement and philosophical attention. Color seems somehow more artistic than our other perceptual dimensions; it’s simply wonderful to behold, as evinced by the double rainbow guy; and we can’t resist wondering what it would be like to see dimensions of color beyond our own. In fact, RadioLab recently put out a great show on color that nicely conveys the romance we all have toward it.

The significance of the colors of things, on the other hand, is much less obvious, and so scientists and philosophers have long wondered whether inverting or otherwise warping or messing with the spectrum might not really matter. These are the “inverted spectra” thought experiments. Maybe green to you is red to me, but the difference leads to no other cognitive or behavioral differences. If colors are arbitrary labels placed over the world, then inversions and warps shouldn’t matter.

Colors can’t be inverted any more than the other dimensions of perceptual experience. Therefore, colors shouldn’t be mucked with. Not in philosophical thought experiments. And not via “color-enhancement” for everyday eyewear, like in sunglasses. After all, that’s what color-enhancement often does: Having been designed without an appreciation for the meanings found within our color experience, color-enhancement has been much like “enhancing” music by blindly fiddling with the mixer knobs.

If the thrill of color were entirely due to the mistaken intuition that colors are arbitrarily splashed onto the world, then, with that intuition dispelled (as I’ve tried to do) color’s beauty would dissipate.

But I don’t believe that the fundamental appeal of color is due to this arbitrary-splashes basis at all. Instead, it seems more likely that our love of color comes from the meaning of color, namely, that color vision for us primates is a deeply human and emotional sense. Color is evocative and aesthetic because its subject-matter concerns the most evocative states of the most important objects in our lives: other people.

That’s why we find color so captivating. It’s not because color floats above the world ungrounded, but, rather, because it is so deeply rooted in our psyche.

For as long as man has pushed a pedal, it’s a question that has challenged psychologists, neurologists and anyone who has wondered how, sometimes, riding a bike can induce what feels close to a state of meditation.

I’ve noticed this myself. Long rides, particularly away from traffic, can help clear my mind of worries and make me focus on the simple act of riding.

In 1896 at the height of the first cycling boom, a feature in the The New York Times said this about the activity: “It has the unique virtue of yielding a rate of speed as great as that of the horse, nearly as great as that attained by steam power, and yet it imposes upon the consciousness the fact that it is entirely self-propulsion.”

The writer, credited only as “ANJ”, continues: “In the nature of the motion is another unique combination. With the great speed there are the subtle glide and sway of skating, something of the yacht’s rocking, a touch of the equestrian bounce, and a suggestion of flying. The effect of all this upon the mind is as wholesomely stimulating as is the exercise to the body.”

Several studies have shown that exercises including cycling make us smarter. Danish scientists who set out to measure the benefits of breakfast and lunch among children found diet helped but that the way pupils travelled to school was far more significant. Those who cycled or walked performed better in tests than those who had travelled by car or public transport, the scientists reported last month. Another study by the University of California in Los Angeles showed that old people who were most active had 5 per cent more grey matter than those who were least active, reducing their risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

In a German study involving 115 students at a sports academy, half the group did activities such as cycling that involved complex co-ordinated movements. The rest performed simpler exercises with the same aerobic demands. Both groups did better than they had in concentration tests, but the “complex” group did a lot better.

Cycling has even been shown to change the structure of the brain. In 2003, Dr Jay Alberts, a neuroscientist at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Ohio, rode a tandem bicycle across the state with a friend who has Parkinson’s to raise awareness of the disease. To the surprise of both riders, the patient showed significant improvements.