While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between e...

The trope of the "body politic" is reproduced in a Bengali popular court, or moot, not only through explicit submetaphors of that master metaphor but through a grammatical example of what Peirce called diagrammatic iconism. The iconism of reduplicated verbs with reciprocal meaning became pivotal in the metacommunicative negotiation of the agenda of a rural Bangladeshi moot. Such forms of iconic...

On the face of it, memory, imagination, and prediction seem to be distinct cognitive functions. However, metacognitive, cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence is emerging that they are not, suggesting intimate links in their underlying processes. Here, we explore these empirical findings and the evolving theoretical frameworks that seek to explain how a common neural system su...

People are known to engage in behaviours aimed at replenishing social connectedness after their sense of belonging is threatened. We explored whether the mental strategy of daydreaming about significant others could have similar effects by acting as an imaginary substitute when loved ones are unavailable. Following a loneliness induction, participants (N = 126) were asked to either daydream abo...

Reality monitoring processes are necessary for discriminating between internally generated information and information that originated in the outside world. They help us to identify our thoughts, feelings, and imaginations, and to distinguish them from events we may have experienced or have been told about by someone else. Reality monitoring errors range from confusions between real and imagine...

It has been widely recognized that the understanding of the brain code would require large-scale recording and decoding of brain activity patterns. In 2007 with support from Georgia Research Alliance, we have launched the Brain Decoding Project Initiative with the basic idea which is now similarly advocated by BRAIN project or Brain Activity Map proposal. As the planning of the BRAIN project is...

Sequence divergence of orthologous proteins enables adaptation to environmental stresses and promotes evolution of novel functions. Limits on evolution imposed by constraints on sequence and structure were explored using a model TIM barrel protein, indole-3-glycerol phosphate synthase (IGPS). Fitness effects of point mutations in three phylogenetically divergent IGPS proteins during adaptation ...

In many organs, including the intestine and skin, cancers originate from cells of the stem or progenitor compartment. Despite its nomenclature, the cellular origin of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains elusive. In contrast to most organs, the liver lacks a defined stem cell population for organ maintenance. Previous studies suggest that both hepatocytes and facultative progenitor cells with...

Elevated serum trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) was previously reported to be associated with an elevated risk for cardiovascular events. TMAO originates from the microbiota-dependent breakdown of food-derived phosphatidylcholine (PC) to trimethylamine (TMA), which is oxidized by hepatic flavin-containing monooxygenases to TMAO. Our aim was to investigate the predominant site of absorption of the ...

Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2002, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 33–53. © 2002 The American Academy of Religion This study presents a phenomenological analysis of Ghazali’s discussion of dreams and dream discourse as it specifically relates to the faculty of the imagination. The imagination is an important, though ambiguous and understudied, category, as it is responsible for diverse...