On my latest podcast, I talk to David Baker of the University of Washington about a remarkable new way of studying biology: turn a problem (protein-folding) into a game, and get 57,000 people to play. Check it out.
Originally published September 24, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
To know the Boston Globe’s Big Picture is to love it. And this week they’ve organized some excellent pictures of animals in the news. Falling bears, gargantuan salmon, and more. Get thee to a photoessay!
Originally published September 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
More brains!
Yesterday I blogged about my new article in the Times about a new theory of consciousness. Today my latest column about the brain is posted at Discover’s web site. I take a look this month at space. One of the most fascinating ways the brain can go awry is known as spatial neglect, in which people simply ignore part of the world around them. (These drawings were made by people suffering from one form of spatial neglect.)
In my column, I look at recent research that uses these kinds of failings to figure out how we build our perception of space in the first place. Check it out!
Originally published September 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
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”