I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how, if mathematics grows out of fundamental cognitive mechanisms, it provides opportunities for seeing more. It is mathematics that allows for the tremendous expansion of empirical study – what we call science. I had the opportunity, last week, to listen to a talk given by Craig […]
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On April 16 Scientificamerican.com reported on research that links hunting for words with foraging for food. Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of […] I’ve always been intrigued by the sensation of movement in music. And it is fair to say that it was my first calculus class that led me to graduate study in mathematics because, for the first time, I saw movement in mathematics. My fascination with each of these was nudged again by an interview with […] If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve probably figured out that this blog is motivated, to a large extent, by my fascination with what mathematics can help us see about the source, targets and bewildering range of human cognition. My expectations rest on the idea that what we have come to call the human mind […] I asked myself a naive question just the other day: “What is a thought?” I wondered about it when, during a workout, I saw my mind drift, and a chain of unrelated memory fragments were brought to my awareness through spontaneous, even nonsensical associations. Their shared presence was prompted, perhaps, by words or by something […] I have tried to make the argument, in some of the things I have written, that mathematics experiments with the ways we are able to ‘see.’ But there is a great deal of complexity in what it means ‘to see.’ ‘Seeing’ and ‘reasoning’ are not easily unraveled. An infant’s ‘intuitive physics,’ the subject of recent […] I see mathematics as associated with a searching, instinctual will, whose direction is shaped by our biology. I find some of its roots in the way our visual system constructs what we see, or in the way grid cells (neurons lit by location) tell a rat where it is, or the way ants can find […] This blog is motivated in part by my conviction that life itself is far more mysterious than we are yet able to ponder. And it is mathematics that has often redirected my attention back to that mystery as its wealth of conceptual possibilities shows me more of what we don’t understand. David Deutsch very nicely […] In a recent post on the Scientific American blog network, George Musser reported on talks given by neuroscientists at a conference, organized by the Foundational Questions Institute on how the brain works to construct our sense of past, present and future. Musser’s post made some observations that were familiar to me – like the idea […] |
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