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“I thought every day was Tiger Day?’ Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
July 29 is International Tiger Day, also called World Tiger Day,1 established to raise awareness about tigers. Or, really, awareness of the need for conservation efforts to protect wild tiger populations in India, Russia, and elsewhere. Because I assume most people have heard of tigers.
But do you know about the different species of tigers? International Tiger Day 2021: What are the different species of tigers?
So, What are the different species of tigers? There are different species of tigers - Siberian tigers, Bengal tigers, Indochinese tigers, Malayan tigers and South China.
Anyway, today is a good day to hug a tiger — carefully — or maybe instead learn a bit more about tigers, adopt a tiger through one of the conservation programs, and generally appreciate these awesome big cats.
Eye-opening and sad tiger fact — there are more tigers living in captivity in the US than there are in the wild. From World Wildlife Fund:
It is estimated that there are around 5,000 captive tigers in the US, more than the approximately 3,900 remaining in the wild. A vast majority of these captive tigers are privately owned and living in people’s backyards, roadside attractions, and private breeding facilities.2 Only an estimated 6% of the US captive tiger population resides in zoos and other facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Do you ever find your brain in sync with someone else’s? Where you feel like you’re “operating on the same frequency” or completing each other’s sentences or even thinking each other’s thoughts?
It turns out there is some scientific basis for that kind of synchronization: Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
… studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.
Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.
You may have experienced this while playing music with someone and falling into rhythmic and melodic harmony. Or you may collectively solved a problem with a team. Perhaps it felt like you were operating at the same frequency — in reality, this might have not been far from the truth.
The article summarizes what is known about neural synchronization. One interesting finding is that functional links appear across people’s brains when they cooperated during certain tasks -- that is, different people’s neural oscillations aligned when they cooperated. But not when they were competing or doing identical tasks separately. Our brains seem to be designed for cooperation.
More interesting to me are the more speculative implications for the nature of consciousness itself. As an amateur psycho-physicist, I have a pet theory about quantum entanglement between minds. Read the article for that discussion and you can also go in more depth with this paper from Neuroscience of Consciousness: What binds us? Inter-brain neural synchronization and its implications for theories of human consciousness:
Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during meaningful social interaction. Moreover, this inter-brain synchronization has been associated with subjective reports of social connectedness, engagement, and cooperativeness, as well as experiences of social cohesion and ‘self-other merging’. These findings challenge the standard view of human consciousness as essentially first-person singular and private.
Just don’t try this with a tiger.
World’s oldest confirmed message in a bottle found! The Oldest Confirmed 'Message in a Bottle' Contained Some Fascinating Questions “In 2018, a message in a bottle dating back to 1886 - 132 years ago - was found half-buried in the sand of a Western Australian beach.”
Apparently it hadn’t occurred to anyone before that the way to best appreciate primitive cave art is by viewing it with the same lighting sources the artists would have had available. How wielding lamps and torches shed new light on Stone Age cave art
This was actually a plot point in a James Rollins novel3 a few years back. As usual, fiction writers are way ahead of reality.
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Thanks to a Happy Subscriber for the tiger news tip! 😉
Probably where all those Instagram pics of girls posing with drugged up tigers come from. Instagram is awful.
The Bone Labyrinth, James Rollins (2015)