Brains
loom | January 12, 2004Today I'll be talking for an hour about Soul Made Flesh on Minnesota public radio. You can listen to the broadcast live online at 11 am EST (the show will be archived). At 2 pm EST, you can listen online again when I talk on the Glen Mitchell show on Dallas public radio.
Some thoughts on the intersection of evolution and global warming coming this afternoon. In the meantime, check out Pharyngula's check-box comparison of the similarities between Soul Made Flesh and Quicksilver. Damn, why did I leave out those pirate neurologists...?
loom | January 9, 2004Oliver Sacks muses on how we construct our perceptions of reality. (Via ALDaily.)
loom | January 2, 2004By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing.
In Science, I've written an essay about what seventeenth-century natural philosophers have to teach twenty-first century neuroscientists about the brain. In the February issue of Popular Science, my cover story looks at the latest work on brain-machine interfaces that will let people control machines with thought alone. Inevitably, the Pop Sci piece can only focus on a time scale of a few years. But the latest brain-…
loom | December 24, 2003I can already see the grim look many Americans will have as they chew on their Christmas roast tomorrow. They'll be thinking about yesterday's report that a cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease. There's some comfort in knowing that so far it's just a single cow, and that American cattle are regularly screened for bovine spongiform encephalitis. The grimmest look this Christmas may be on the faces of McDonald's shareholders and cattle ranchers. A single Canadian cow that test positive wreaked havoc on the entire beef industry up north. But this Christmas also brings a…
loom | December 18, 2003I will never figure out the publishing world. My new book, Soul Made Flesh officially publishes on January 6, 2004. But Amazon and Powell's both say they've got it now and can get it to customers in 1-2 days. I guess time isn't what it used to be.
I have put some early reviews on my web site. Booklist: "Remarkable." Kirkus Reviews: "Absorbing and thought-provoking." Publisher's Weekly: "Illuminating."
Reminder: seven days left till Christmas.
loom | December 17, 2003Here's a new development in the search I described last week for the genes that make us uniquely human. Science's Michael Balter reports on a new study about a gene that's crucial for making big brains. Mutant versions of the gene produce people with tiny brains--about the size that Lucy had 3.5 million years ago. Comparisons of the human version of the gene with other mammals shows that it has undergone intense natural selection in our own lineage.
Size is far from everything, however. While humans have huge brains compared to other mammals, new kinds of wiring may have been more important…
loom | December 15, 2003Darwin's spirit lives on in everything from the Human Genome Project to medicine to conservation biology--the three topics I covered in my post on Friday. It also lives on in brain scans.
While Darwin is best known for The Origin of Species, he also wrote a lot of books in later years, most of which explored some aspect of nature that he showed revealed the workings of evolution. His examples ranged from orchids to peacock tails. In his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he proposed that the expressions we humans use--our smiles, our frowns, and so on--are part of a…
loom | November 23, 2003It's too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I'm still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to name the favorite book they read in 2003. Yesterday it printed the results. Steven Pinker chose Soul Made Flesh.
He writes: "Today the idea that every aspect of human experience consists of activity in the brain is second nature to some people, and an 'astonishing hypothesis'- or even sacrilege - to others. But few are aware of the ancestry of this idea. Soul Made Flesh tells…
loom | November 18, 2003For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are basically complex graphs that represent the relationships of data gathered in very narrowly defined experiments and which are then statistically massaged with special-purpose software. But for most of us non-scientists (and even some scientists) it's easy to look at these images as objective snapshots of…
loom | November 13, 2003The case of Terri Schiavo has moved back into the Bleak House realm of endless trips to the courthouse. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Schiavo lost consciousness thirteen years ago, and her husband has been trying for the past few years to have her feeding tube removed over the objections of her parents. The Florida legislature recently passed a law that gave Governor Jeb Bush the authority to order Schiavo's tube put back in, and now her husband is going to court to challenge the constitutionality of the law.
The frenzy of editorials and TV interviews is beginning to subside, but only a…
loom | October 31, 2003Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns now for a disgusting encore that gives a glimpse at how we get inside other people's heads.
European scientists had people sniff vials that gave off different odors while they were being scanned with MRI. Disgusting smells triggered a distinct constellation of neurons in the insula. Then the researcers showed the subjects videos of people smelling vials of their own. In some…
loom | October 23, 2003After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the objection of her family. Then on Tuesday, Governor Jeb Bush ordered that her tube be reattached, using powers given to him by the Florida legislature the day before.
If ever there was an argument for a living will, the Schiavo case is one. She supposedly told her husband she wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially, but never wrote anything down. If she had, the…
loom | October 17, 2003Science is so specialized these days that it's hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don't have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study globular clusters probably can't tell you what's new with planetary disks. But sometimes scientists from different specialties can come together and integrate their work into something truly impressive. A case in point comes from some ongoing research into the evolution of language.
No species aside from our own can use language. Chimpanzees and other…
loom | October 17, 2003My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I've posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf.
loom | October 15, 2003In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn.
Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities (versus humans and the old '10% of the brain thing') and 'more efficient' in the way it works."
To which Brent M. Krupp responded: "That 'old "10% of the brain thing' is complete and utter rubbish. Not a grain of truth to it, nor was there ever. Sorry to go off on this pet peeve of mine, but it's unclear if you were serious in your reference to that myth."
I…
loom | October 10, 2003There's been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned yesterday, that's the same area that responds to pain and physical distress. It's an interesting paper with historical dimensions that are missing from the news reports--historical in both the human and evolutionary sense. There's a lot of back-story behind the word "heartache."
A common theme in evolution is the way a structure or a system takes on new functions over time. In our "…
loom | October 9, 2003One reason that I'm so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about something that was on their mind--an exam, a girlfirend, and so on. Then, while scanning their brains with an MRI machine, they told their subjects NOT to think about that thing.
We're all pretty comfortable with the idea that thoughts are the product of neurons, electrical impluses, and neurotransmitters. But if that's all that thought is, then what (or who)…
loom | October 7, 2003It's never pretty to see journalism transformed into propaganda, especially when you're the one who wrote the journalism. I recently did an article for the New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. The National Right to Life web site then posted a long "News & Views" piece by one Dave Andrusko that pretended to recount my article. It was annoying enough to see careless mistakes--adding quotation marks to a passage from the article, so as to put it into the mouth of a doctor, for example. But it was really unpleasant to see my article distorted to serve a…
loom | September 27, 2003I wrote an article for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn't even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article--using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries--is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca's discovery of a…