A Bronx cheer for the four-legged hobbit from one of its discoverers. See my updated post.
Category: Blog
Well, here’s an idea I haven’t heard of before…
There have been some interesting new developments in the study of the evolution of language. The idea that human language emerged from hand gestures rather than sounds has been getting very popular in recent years. Some scientists think that certain neurons in the brain played a crucial role in this gestural prehistory. Known as mirror neurons, they simulate the movement of other people’s hands, among other things. In the October 14 issue of Science, a team of scientists showed that mirror neurons are even more sophisticated than previously thought. They even speculate that some mirror neurons could have helped give rise to different components of sentences, such as subjects and verbs.
Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn’t scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn’t exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for my book Soul Made Flesh, I was struck by the way philosophers–and philosophical questions–are now making their way back into the scientific study of the brain. Last year in Discover I wrote about the work of the philosopher/neuroscientistJoshua Greene, who studies how we make moral judgments. But it turns out that neuroscientists are tackling an even deeper philosophical question: what is the self? They may not have the whole answer, but they’ve found some very interesting pieces of it. I’ve written an article on the neurobiology of the self, which appears in the November issue of Scientific American.
The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious.