In today’s New York Times, I profile the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, who has been obsessed since childhood with building a theory of consciousness–a theory that could let him measure the level of consciousness with a number, just as doctors measure temperature and blood pressure with numbers.
Continue reading “What Is It Like To Be A Bat? What Is It Like To Be You?”
Discover, September 21, 2010
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781.
The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine. But for some people it is part of everyday life. Strokes can rob us of space. So can brain injuries and tumors.
Continue reading “The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives”
The New York Times, September 20, 2010
One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally had a chance to become his own experiment.
The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and another one to block muscle movements.
Andrew, a medical student, writes,
“I recently got a tattoo of Penicillin G on my arm. As someone who stumbled into medical school as a non-traditional student after a few career missteps, I appreciate a good mistake. There are few mistakes that were as amazing and important to medicine as the ‘discovery’ of Penicillin. Had Alexander Fleming remembered to close his laboratory’s window, who knows where we would be in the fight against infectious disease?”
This is one of those meta stories that just won’t quit. Over the summer, scienceblogs.com lost a bunch of bloggers thanks to a certain bubbly beverage. A lot of the bloggers moved off to set up their own blogs elsewhere, which I tried to track in this post.
Continue reading “Science blog networks now officially kudzu-esque”