Neurotransmitters are highly important and mind-bendingly complex. That’s why now and then I hip-check writers who boil neurotransmitters down to simple stories. Neurotransmitters are multi-purpose messengers. They’re versatile enough, in fact, to get hijacked by parasitic worms who use them to enslave perfectly innocent shrimplike creatures called gammarids. As Carl Zimmer relates, in Parasites Use […]
Continue reading →Earlier this week, I wrote a post criticizing Naomi Wolf’s use of science in her book “Vagina: A New Biography.” (See Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon.) My complaint was that Wolf treated an incredibly complex and ambiguous body of science — the neurobiology of […]
Continue reading →Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller explains in her smart, raucous, ripping review in The New York Review of Books, [Wolf’s] original plan was to write a book surveying cultural representations of the vagina through the ages. […]
Continue reading →This re-imagined human brain seems more analogous to a slum than to any conventional urban ideal. Like a slum, the brain does not reveal its intricacies by exposing its design. Instead, it works in mysterious ways, moving through invisible systems and unseen channels that escape explanation. An installation by Yaron Steinburg, via Architizer and John Rennie.
Continue reading →Ever since the late 1990s, when researchers discovered that the human brain takes into our mid-20s to fully develop — far longer than previously thought — the teen brain has been getting a bad rap. Teens, the emerging dominant narrative insisted, were “works in progress” whose “immature brains” left them in a state “akin to mental […]
Continue reading →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 […]
Continue reading →Your brain, in some ways, is really several brains trying to agree on one account of the world. Sometimes those many brains don’t agree, and they produce confusion — or an illusion. At her wonderful Biophemera, Jessica Palmer uses a review of new book by Roberg Kurzban, to look at how this works. Psychologist Robert Kurzban’s […]
Continue reading →The Collar Late in May 2008, perched in superb seats a few rows behind home plate at Chicago’s Cellular Field, I took in a White Sox-Indians game with Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who studies what is surely, other than serious injury, the most feared catastrophe in sports: the […]
Continue reading →Where does consciousness come from? And when it ramps up or down, at what point does it move from consciousness to not-consciousness? Carl Zimmer published both a blog post and a story in the New York Times yesterday looking at the work of Guilioi Tononi, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who looks at these questions. […]
Continue reading →I perked up a couple weeks ago when I read Jonah Lehrer’s post about e-books and the possible differences between reading a screen and reading a page. Like Jonah, I regard e-books with an excitement tinged with lament. But as he notes, the tide is in; they’re here to stay. Jonah describes in his post […]
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