cool like dat. there are people getting paid to study the mechanisms behind being "cool" and "uncool." what is this crap? i've been studying/musing over this stuff for years and i'm not paid a damn penny. ridiculous. of course these people are doing it through brain mapping and stringent use of the scientific process but i contend that casual observation and personal bias can lead to the same results. nobody has, of yet, given me any money to support my life's work. maybe i need to get a phD and a few more IQ points, then i'll finally have some intellectual credibility.



tangent: i wonder which is harder to obtain, intellectual credibility or street/urban cred. my money's on street. it's easier to fake intellectual knowledge, at least for a few seconds. prime examples being all the retards who get jobs, or get into great schools, and you're left wondering "how'd they do that?!" anyways.

caltech's social cognitive neuroscience lab is doing a study on what it means to be cool. "unlike a mere written test, (this) experiment would use functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, to measure my (the author's) subconscious response to 140 different products and celebrities, each of which had been assigned a coolness rating from 0 to 5.



depending on how successful my subconscious picks out the cool objects, i would be classified as one of three types: high cool (a "trendsetter"), high uncool(a "critic"), or low cool. ...high cools, i was told, had brains that lit up in response to cool objects. high uncools reacted strongly to uncool objects; they're the snobby tastemakers. the last group, the low cools, was the one i feared. low cools had scans that came out almost entirely blank. it didn't matter whether they were looking at a picture of michael jackson or mick jagger. they were, in effect, cool-blind."

in effect, you are shown cool things and uncool things, and you'll be monitored for when things effect you, positively or negatively. if they don't effect you at all, you are out of touch with reality and slapped with the disparaging "low cool" label. oh the horror. our intrepid author ends up testing out as "high cool," even though she introduces herself in the article as the queen of low cool. two other people who took the test ranked out as high uncool and low cool. the difference in the author's initial impressions of herself and the other guinea pigs, compared with the results, makes me doubt the veracity of the test but i'll set that issue aside for now. maybe my whole theory on "the more uncool you were at fifteen, the more cool you are at twenty five" holds some water. moving along.

the results from this test indicate that both high cools and high uncools "show activity in the motor cortex, which is normally engaged when the brain is thinking about reaching for something it wants. while that is expected in high cools, it is baffling in the high uncools. do they secretly like the uncool objects, or is it actually a sign of revulsion: a desire to hurl the offending objects far away? likewise, what is the meaning of the activity in the section of prefrontal cortex known as brodmann area 10 - one of several regions that have been tentatively linked to our sense of personal identity?



according to quartz (the researcher), high cool trendsetters, who define themselves by the coolness of their accessories, are more likely to picture themselves with the cool object and to imagine how others will react. but if this is right, why are high uncools defining themselves with respect to objects they dislike? quartz thinks it might be a sign of social anxiety: maybe the high uncools are worried about being seen with such lame objects. "or it might have something do with their sense of self," he muses."

okay, i've copied and pasted enough. just read the damn article. then we'll talk.