Eleven years ago, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers made a bizarre claim: our minds were not limited to our brains, but extended out of our heads to encompass many things beyond us, from notebooks to hammers to language. I have been vaguely aware of their “Extended Mind Hypothesis” for a while now, but it wasn’t until I got a copy of Clark’s latest book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension , that I spent some time getting to know it better. And as counterintuitive as it may be at first, it makes a fair amount of sense when you take a look at the results of recent experiments on real minds.
Author: Lori Jia
Our discussion yesterday about bad science writing took a sharp turn, jumped the rails, and landed over at Language Log, where my brother Ben takes over. Suddenly I feel a new kinship with the Psalms Book of Proverbs….
Originally published January 14, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
At a recent meeting of biologists, a friend handed me a piece of paper that had been folded into eighths, with hand-drawn pictures and writing about biology. Why…it’s a zine, I thought. It came from the Small Science Collective, which has put together lots of foldable booklets about science that they encourage you to download for free and leave on your bus, at your favorite coffee shop, or anywhere else you might want to spread knowledge about bot flies (and about lots of other science almost as cool as bot flies). And if you want to join the collective, they want to hear from you.
Arwyn writes: “Even though psychology is a soft science. I present Sigmund Freud. The tattoo is part of a sleeve that I call ‘Freud’s Dream,’ hence the little thought bubbles.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published January 14, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Over at Science News, Janet Raloff has a report about Steven Chu’s appearance earlier today before the Senate for his nomination to be Secretary of Energy. It sounds like he really perked up when asked about biofuels from synthetic biology:
Chu explained that the two-year-old program is striving to develop fourth-generation biofuels. To date, researchers at the lab have “trained” bacteria and yeast to take simple sugars and produce “not ethanol, but gasoline-like substitutes, diesel-fuel substitutes and jet [fuel] substitutes.”