I was in Ewa's apartment the other day waiting as she fussed about looking for her ID (one of those drinking nights), and started flipping through one of the journals on her table. In it, I came across a review of experimental existential psychology, a relatively new branch of the discipline that deals with quantifying human behavioral responses to the five big existential concerns -- death, isolation, identity, freedom and meaning. For instance, when subjects are administered a mortality salience paradigm (What do you feel when you think about your won death?), accessibility of death thoughts increases, and, defense mechanisms (such as taking greater pains to boost ones self-esteem) concurrently kick in.

This was kind of interesting, in the way that sexy science often is, but it was only later that I figured out why it was really so appealing to me. Scientists always get slammed by the conservative and the religious for being reductionist and taking the numinousness out of everything -- well, here you have a set of emergent feelings just begging to be understood, so we can have wonder without despair, ponder the infinite without shrinking ourselves to the infinitesimal. Imagine: clinics you can go to to learn cognitive stratification - keep the abstract in your head, and go enjoy a good dinner afterwards. There's a huge market for this; just remember, I thought of it first.