This coming Monday and Tuesday, March 26 and 27, I’ll be giving talks on science and writing at Binghamton University, hosted by David Sloan Wilson and the Evolutionary Studies Program as well as the Dean’s office. First I’ll talk about the orchid gene hypothesis; that’s Monday at 5pm. On Tuesday afternoon I’ll talk about using…
Monthly Archives: March 2012
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This is How We Think: We Make Constellations From Stars
by David Dobbs •
A recent conversation on Twitter between @TimCarmody and @RobinSloan alerted me to this brilliant post from Tim Carmody (who can also be found at Wired’s EpiCenter). It’s a lovely description of how we make sense of things, finding patterns in what’s presented to us, both in science and in everyday life. The thing is, even the…
Brains and Behavior, Culture of Science, Psychiatry, Published elsewhere
The PTSD Trap: Our Overdiagnosis of PTSD In Vets Is Enough to Make You Sick
by David Dobbs •
Author’s note: This story originally appeared in Scientific American, April 2009. As the suggestion of U.S. Army medical student Petulant Skeptic (see below), I am re-publishing it here, open access, because the return of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars renews the importance of examining our ideas about how most soldiers react to combat. As…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
Are You Part of Steven Pinker’s “Science-flunking Intellectual Elite”?
by David Dobbs •
In a passage highlighted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Stephen Pinker, in an interview in The Observer last week, argues that statistical ignorance is our intellectual culture’s great failure. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
Can Genes Send You High or Low? The Orchid Hypothesis A-Bloom
by David Dobbs •
Author’s: This post is an expansion of a feature I published a few weeks ago in New Scientist. It draws from research for a book I’m now writing, The Orchid and the Dandelion (Crown; ETA 2015). I originally explored this subject, at more length (and with monkeys) in a November 2009 Atlantic article, “Orchid Children.” A few years ago,…
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Neurocritic Asks: Does the Human Dorsal Stream Really Process Elongated Vegetables?
by David Dobbs •
You can’t make this stuff up. Neurocritic on a roll here. But there was part of me that wanted nothing beyond the title and the opening graphic and caption: Does the Human Dorsal Stream Really Process Elongated Vegetables? What do zucchini and hammers have in common? Both might be processed by the dorsal stream.…
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Maybe The Coolest Dance Film Ever – Or Is It Film Dancing?
by David Dobbs •
The film comes straight via the invaluable Snarkmarket. It looks like something out of film class, but the video itself is undoctored: The dance is shot as it appeared to the audience, without cuts or angle changes. But as the audience’s excitement makes clear, it came off the stage as it comes off the screen here: as something…
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Trash Talk From An 80-Year-Old Hitter: “Throw Me A Real Pitch!”
by David Dobbs •
Neurogeek Bradley Voytek describes how he met neuroanatomist Marian Diamond — on the softball diamond. He was a Ph.D. student in neuroscience. She was a very senior faculty member, close on 80 at the time, according to Voytek: We were at the neuroscience picnic during the first year of my PhD. I was pitching in…
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Sharing Nicely With Gorillas, and Other Adventures in Genetic Misunderstanding
by David Dobbs •
Evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks, eagle-eyed as ever, calls out a common mistake made by one expert in a response to findings in the gorilla genome: The Nature News story on the gorilla genome includes this section relevant to the evolution of hearing in gorillas and humans: [from the Nature story:] Some of these rapid changes…
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SMILE: A Simple Act Becomes a Too-Simple eBook
by David Dobbs •
As I noted a few days ago, I’m now one of the editor-reviewers at Download The Universe, a site dedicated to reviewing ebooks about science. My colleagues, there, who include some of science writing’s best, have already reviewed books on exoplanets, superorganisms, doomsday, and contagious cancer, to name only the most recent. Below is my first…
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