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Embodied Minds, Surfing and Mathematics

Mark Turner, cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve, wrote an article that was recently posted on the Social Science Research Network entitled The Embodied Mind and the Origins of Human Culture. He makes the point that our awareness is divorced from “Almost all the heavy lifting in human thought and action,” which is done “in […]

Grid cells and time cells in rats, continuity, and the monkey’s mind

I have often said that I get particular pleasure from mathematics that defies common sense expectations. A simple example would be the observation that two things can be the same size even though one of them is contained in the other – like the set of natural numbers and the set of positive even integers. […]

Slow Hunches and Our Spotty Awareness

I recently listened to a radiolab podcast (from this past November!) that featured two authors: Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants). The thrust of the argument, that both authors defended, was that the things we make (from tools to gadgets to computers) are an […]

Changing the Evolutionary Minded?

I found myself tied a bit to the theme of last week’s blog when my attention was brought to a very recent article in PLoS Biology called Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. In it a team of biologists, psychologists and philosophers from the Netherlands, the United States and Scotland, suggest that the […]

Bugs in the brain?

NPR recently hosted an interview with Dean Buonomano, neuroscientist and author of the book Brain Bugs: How The Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives.

I usually like evolutionary perspectives, and enjoy thoughts on how our experience, however abstract and complex it may seem, is somehow built on the biological stuff of our world. But the best […]

Outer and Inner Limits of the Brain (or the body)

A recent Scientific American article on the physical limits of intelligence raised more questions for me than it answered with its intriguing analysis of neural mechanisms. The point of the article is to consider that it may be physically impossible for humanity to become more ‘intelligent’ with further evolution. I think we would all agree, […]

On Wilczek and Symmetry (Inside and Out)

I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics and author of the book The Lightness of Being. During the Q and A after the talk he was asked if our aesthetic judgment of symmetry could be said to prejudice scientific inquiry. Wilczek first pointed to the rich […]

How Far Can Distance Take Us

I would like to follow up on Alain Connes’ statement in my last blog. The weave of mathematical thought is tight. The seeds of mathematics are found in early explorations of number relationships and in observations of what we call space. But symbol, stripped of content, has led to heightened powers of thought and discernment. […]

Plato And Fish That Count

In a recent post I said that one of the things that dissuades us from accepting the existence of a truly Platonic mathematical world, or believing in the timeless existence of its forms independent of human minds, is the habit we have of distinguishing ourselves from the rest of nature, despite all the evidence we’ve […]

Math, Music and Polyphonic States

The following exchange between M.P. Schutzenberger and A. Connes is lifted from the book Triangle of Thoughts:

M. P. S. — …language begins with poetry rather than with grammar; euphony plays a big role here.

A. C. — Your point of view coincides with my own, since I sincerely believe that music is at its […]