How Your Brain Can Control Time

Posted on December 19, 2008May 28, 2020 by admin

Discover, December 19, 2008

Whenever I lose my watch, I take my sweet time to get a new one. I savor the freedom from my compulsion to carve my days into minute-size fragments. But my liberty has its limits. Even if I get rid of the clock strapped to my wrist, I cannot escape the one in my head. The human brain keeps time, from the flicker of milliseconds to the languorous unfurling of hours and days and years. It’s the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Keeping track of time is essential for perceiving what’s happening around us and responding to it. In order to tell where a voice is coming from, we time how long it takes for the sound to reach both ears. And when we respond to the voice by speaking ourselves, we need precise timing to make ourselves understood.

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Now: The Rest of the Genome

Posted on November 10, 2008May 28, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, November 11, 2008

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Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said.

But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein.

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Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes

Posted on October 31, 2008May 8, 2020 by admin

Scientific American, October 31, 2008

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In Robert Plomin’s line of work, patience is essential. Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, wants to understand the nature of intelligence. As part of his research, he has been watching thousands of children grow up. Plomin asks the children questions such as “What do water and milk have in common?” and “In what direction does the sun set?” At first he and his colleagues quizzed the children in person or over the telephone. Today many of those children are in their early teens, and they take their tests on the Internet.

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The Evolution of Extraordinary Eyes: The Cases of Flatfishes and Stalk-eyed Flies

Posted on October 16, 2008May 28, 2020 by admin

Evolution: Education and Outreach, October 16, 2008

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The history of life is an unbroken stream of evolution stretching over 3.5 billion years. In order to study it—and in order to describe it—it must be carved into episodes. If scientists want to understand the origin, say, of bats, they do not run experiments to test a hypothesis about how DNA first evolved on the early Earth. They do not do research on the transition from single-celled protozoans to the first animals 600 million years ago. Likewise, they do not get bogged down with bat evolution after bats first evolved—how, for example, bats spread around the world and how they coevolved with their prey. There is only so much time in the day.

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Why Darwin Would Have Loved Botox

Posted on October 15, 2008May 28, 2020 by admin

Discover, October 15, 2008

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Darwin would have loved Botox.

I don’t mean that he would have been first in line at the doctor’s office to get a needle jabbed into his famously furrowed brow. I mean that Darwin would have loved to use Botox as a scientific tool—to eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between the face and brain.

For much of his life, Darwin was obsessed with faces. On a visit to the London Zoo, he gave mirrors to a pair of orangutans and watched them grimace and pucker their lips as they stared at their reflections. He passed many an afternoon gazing intently at photographs of crying babies and laughing women.

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