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I have long felt this to be true. Definitely is for me, I am a completely different person speaking English than in Mandarin. In fact, even the two dialects I use in English have different personalities associated with them.

I attended a meeting with a local Taiwanese discussion group the other day. We watched a documentary on the life of three rice farmers in Tainan, Taiwan. This was followed with a discussion on the economic factors leading to the extinction of the occupation in Taiwan. These came up - ideas of economic comparative advantage, realities of sociopolitical structure, and philosophies behind robust personal happiness. It was a good discussion.

People are evidently willing to get together to talk about important issues. In fact, a few hours of dedicated time is easier to get than trying to get people to write to a forum with their ideas. Talking is easier than writing.

The transient nature of the discussion is regrettable though. I'm working on a format for generating web-publishable content from these very meaningful discussions.

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They used a burst of magnetic pulses called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – produced by coils held over the scalp – to temporarily shut off activity in the DLPFC. Now, when faced with the opportunity to spitefully reject a cheeky low cash offer, subjects were actually more likely to take the money.

Erm. Hold on there. Influencing thoughts using ElectroMagnetic fields? Asimov's mentalic robots are closer than we think.