“Toronto researchers are challenging a longstanding belief about the mind and, in the process, suggesting there is additional hope for people who have lost many of their personal memories after a devastating brain injury. The researchers have concluded that people with such memory loss can still read other people’s feelings and intentions — they can still detect sarcasm or deception, for example — abilities necessary for social relationships.

“It’s encouraging to know that this ability may be more resilient and preserved in us than was first thought,” neuropsychologist Shayna Rosenbaum of the Baycrest Centre’s Rotman Research Institute said in a release Thursday.

The scientists, from the Baycrest institute and York University, tested the assumption that humans rely on their personal recollections, called episodic memory, to make sense of other people’s behaviour. This “theory of mind” is widely accepted in scientific circles.” (CBC)

Even babies make social judgments, study suggests: “‘Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual,’ …Yale University psychology researchers report in the edition of Nature to be published Thursday.” (CBC)

‘Garrett Lisi is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week. By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity – or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.’ (New Scientist thanks to abby)