The past couple weeks have been a scramble for me (the end of the school year tends to crash like a rogue wave into the lives of parents). During that time, I’ve written a couple new “Matter” columns for the New York Times, both of which concerning how our brains work:
Continue reading “Catching Up: Brains, Writing, and Hot Hands”
The New York Times, June 26, 2014
From time to time, athletes get on a streak. Suddenly, the basketball goes through the net every time, or a batter gets a hit in every game. This blissful condition is often known as the hot hand, and players have come to believe it is real — so much so that they have made it a part of their strategy for winning games.
“On offense, if someone else has a hot hand, I constantly lay the ball on him,” wrote the N.B.A. legend Walt Frazier in his 1974 memoir, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool.”
Continue reading “That’s So Random: Why We Persist in Seeing Streaks”
There’s a philosophical quandary breeding in your mouth. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have searched for the right way to classify living things. We call living things with feathers “birds,” but we can also divide birds up into smaller groups, like pigeons and storks. We can drill down even further, to different species of pigeons. But it doesn’t feel right to classify birds all the way down to every individual feathered creature on Earth. The fundamental unit of life’s biodiversity has long been the species. Charles Darwin named his book The Origin of Species for a reason.
The New York Times, June 20, 2014
A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.
That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.
In the early 1800s, a naturalist named Alexander Wilson was traveling in Kentucky when the sky suddenly became dark. Wilson believed, he later wrote, that it was “a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything round in destruction.”
When Wilson got his wits back, he realized the sun had been blotted out by passenger pigeons.