inkbluesky

river calm wallpaper

This photo reminded me of what is known as the Hudson River School of art and the painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Cole was an English immigrant and while his later work was influenced by the English landscape painter J.M.W.Turner he originated a subtle distinctly American break from European neoclassical tradition. The Oxbow(1836) on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is probably his most famous painting. A giant landscape of a bend in the Connecticut River. It has its Romantic period qualities, but the Oxbow was also a turning point for American and European art as artists like Cole aimed to obtain an almost photographic naturalism.

A Cole gallery and a biography.

That which makes us clever, make us mad

One of the most devastating types of mental illness could be a by-product of the evolution of human beings’ uniquely sophisticated intelligence, a new genetic study has suggested.

Scientists have discovered that a common version of a particular gene appears both to enhance a key thinking circuit in the brain, and to be linked to a raised risk of schizophrenia.

The findings, from a study by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), provide fresh evidence for the theory that schizophrenia is the price that some people pay for our species’s peculiarly advanced intellectual abilities.

The research hints that some of the genetic factors that underpin the human brain’s cognitive capacities can also go wrong to leave a sizeable minority prone to mental illness.

It looks like our capacity for rational thought had a flaw in the design.