It’s ridiculous how many things Robert Sapolsky talks about beautifully. Here he’s on a roll about how dopamine drives behavior: It’s not about reward, but its anticipation. And we humans have done well — we’ve developed these splendid executive skills and planning and so on — because these big ol’ brains can maintain that anticipation…
Monthly Archives: July 2011
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Ancient Arab Medicine Goes Online
by David Dobbs •
As Egypt hints at an Arabic spring in science, Western museums and institutions are highlighting the rich Arabic roots of science past. I wrote a few weeks ago about a new exhibit on Arabick roots at the Royal Society. Now comes a contribution from the Biblioteca Alexandrina and the Wellcome Library: The Wellcome Library is…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Reef Madness 6: The Death of Louis Agassiz
by David Dobbs •
This is the sixth installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral. The prior installment described how Charles Darwin seduced Harvard botanist Asa Gray, enlisting him in defeating Alexander’s father, the famous creationist zoologist Louis, in a series of debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution.…
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I Got StoryBoarded: A Chat About Writing
by David Dobbs •
A couple weeks ago I had a good long conversation with The Open Notebook about writing My Mother’s Lover (a story about my mother’s obscured World War II romance). Now the Nieman Storyboard, a wonderful site that “breaks down story in every medium,” posted a conversation I had recently with their Andrea Pitzer: Old story,…
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Do Big Governments Make for Small People?
by David Dobbs •
That’s what John Boehner said last night. Ezra Klein brings the fact-check: “You know,” Speaker John Boehner said last night, “I’ve always believed the bigger the government, the smaller the people.” That led Jonathan Cohn to tweet that the “Netherlands has 45% GDP from gov’tM spending and the world’s tallest people.” What I’ve always believed is…
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Is Science Communication Returning to Its Roots?
by David Dobbs •
Former BMJ editor Richard Smith nicely delivers the argument: A compelling piece in the Economist argues that social media are returning news to the “more vibrant, freewheeling, and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era” and that newspapers will prove to have been a historical aberration. The same, I think, will be true of scientific journals. His argument…
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The Toughest Plane Ever Built? Take a Look
by David Dobbs •
World War II inspired intense experimentation human and mechanical. My mother’s affair with a flight surgeon, for instance, was a personal experiment, more or less intentional, that was in turn part of a larger, accidental experiment in which millions of people were uprooted from their daily lives and dropped into intense situations with strangers. Much…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
A’glitter In the Net: Mirrored Monkeys, Chilly Skeptics, More Monkeys, Cocaine, and Whales
by David Dobbs •
Some of my favs from the last week or so. The photo above sums the dilemma explored in Seeing the Monkey in the Mirror: It’s not just the monkey in the mirror: It’s people looking at monkeys looking at themselves in a mirror that the person holds. A nice meta-level look at this self-recognition paradigm by @SrsMonkeyBiz,…
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Why Behold Beauty? Because It’s Sociable.
by David Dobbs •
This I could not resist: Ed Yong and Jonah Lehrer have written intriguing fine pieces about a new study of beauty — or rather, beauty’s appreciation. The study examines which brain regions fire up when a viewer perceives something that he or she finds beautiful: It’s not a particular stimulus that evokes these distinctive brain…
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Check Out These Swinging Balls of Steel
by David Dobbs •
If you have friends who actually believe National Science Foundation money is going to waste, show them this: an expansion of the usual 5-ball desktop oscillation toy. Good stuff. I’m hoping Rhett Allain will step in and explain the physics. From a neuro perpsective, this makes me think of Gyorgy Buzsaki’s wonderful book Rhythms of the…
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