Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making
Ross Andersen writes: On a hot afternoon in late June, I pulled to the side of a two-lane desert highway in eastern New Mexico, next to a specific mile marker. An hour earlier, a woman had told me to...
View ArticleHenry Gustave Molaison — the man who forgot everything
Steven Shapin writes: In the movie “Groundhog Day,” the TV weatherman Phil Connors finds himself living the same day again and again. This has its advantages, as he has hundreds of chances to get...
View ArticleThe inexact mirrors of the human mind
Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB), published in 1979, and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI), gained prominence right at a juncture when...
View ArticleA theory of how networks become conscious
Wired: It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from...
View ArticleSlow-motion world for small animals
BBC News reports: Smaller animals tend to perceive time as if it is passing in slow motion, a new study has shown. This means that they can observe movement on a finer timescale than bigger creatures,...
View ArticleDouglas Hofstadter — Research on artificial intelligence is sidestepping the...
Douglas Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist at Indiana University and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Popular Mechanics: You’ve said in the past that...
View ArticleNature-deficit disorder and the effects of selective attention
Richard Louv writes: Not long ago, from a vantage point on a high bluff above a shoreline, Carol Birrell watched a group of high school students as they hiked through a park that was bordered on one...
View ArticleSearching for the elephant’s genius inside the largest brain on land
Ferris Jabr writes: Many years ago, while wandering through Amboseli National Park in Kenya, an elephant matriarch named Echo came upon the bones of her former companion Emily. Echo and her family...
View ArticleThe living death of solitary confinement
Lisa Guenther writes: I first met Five Omar Mualimm-ak at a forum on solitary confinement in New York City. He wore track shoes with his tailored suit. ‘As long as the Prison Industrial Complex keeps...
View ArticleHow music hijacks our perception of time
Jonathan Berger writes: One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that...
View ArticleHow memory speaks
Jerome Groopman writes: I began writing these words on what appeared to be an unremarkable Sunday morning. Shortly before sunrise, the bedroom still dim, I awoke and quietly made my way to the kitchen,...
View ArticleThe way we live our lives in stories
Jonathan Gottschall: There’s a big question about what it is that makes people people. What is it that most sets our species apart from every other species? That’s the debate that I’ve been involved in...
View ArticleNothingness: From a childhood hallucination to the halls of theoretical physics
Alan Lightman writes: My most vivid encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my...
View ArticleThe orchestration of attention
The New Yorker: Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears receive...
View ArticleThe grand illusion of time
Jim Holt writes: It was Albert Einstein who initiated the revolution in our understanding of time. In 1905, Einstein proved that time, as it had been understood by physicist and plain man alike, was a...
View ArticleWhat is it like to be a bee?
In the minds of many humans, empathy is the signature of humanity and yet if this empathy extends further and includes non-humans we may be suspected of indulging in anthropomorphism — a sentimental...
View ArticleThe thoughts of our ancient ancestors
The discovery of what appear to have been deliberately etched markings made by a human ancestor, Homo erectus, on the surface of a shell, call for a reconsideration of assumptions that have been made...
View ArticleNeurological conductors that keep the brain in time and tune
Harvard Gazette: Like musical sounds, different states of mind are defined by distinct, characteristic waveforms, recognizable frequencies and rhythms in the brain’s electrical field. When the brain is...
View ArticleHow music takes possession of our perception of time
Jonathan Berger writes: One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that...
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