Brain imaging studies show that a particular area of the brain, one associated with the reward system, is activated when subjects contemplate a photo of their lover.
In Morisot's paintings, women are like Tiburce Morisot's description of his famous sister: "meditative, mysterious, like all those in whom silence is due not to deficiency of thought but to a disdain for its expression". Even side by side with their children, her subjects contemplate themselves apart, in an atmosphere of self-imposed solitude that lifts them above their circumstances.
The role of imagination in counterfactual thinking and, in particular, the question of what tends to be held constant when subjects contemplate counterfactual scenarios has been explored in detail in recent empirical psychological work.
Subjects who contemplated their mortality showed about 15% stronger belief in science, as measured by a questionnaire similar to that used in the previous experiment, than those who had written about the less traumatic subject of dental pain, the team reports online this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
He was tired by the end of the day, his interest in The Temple flagged, and from time to time his attention wandered to other subjects; he contemplated a book on Silenus, but he admitted that it "may or may not... be written".
The snippet shows Austen writing that: "Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding – certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning," This was a subject she contemplated in her own novel Mansfield Park, which was also published in 1814.
He has a reputation for the thoroughness with which he researches subjects before contemplating his plot, and "The Hard Problem" oozes learning.
Part of his success lay in the unwillingness of his great (noble) subjects to contemplate a social and political upheaval that would displace them as well as the king from their positions of power and prestige.
But when the composer Hannah Lash contemplated subjects for a planned chamber opera involving two singers and string quartet, she picked "Beauty and the Beast" specifically for its qualities of intimacy, vulnerability and conflict.
Suicide is a difficult subject to contemplate.
