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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 […] 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. […] A number of websites have reported on a recent study, that correlated innate number sense with mathematical ability. A concise report of the study can be found in the Johns Hopkins University Gazette, published by the institution where the study was done. The study’s results confirm a correlation between the strength of ones number sense […] 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 […] I was reading up on some nineteenth century philosophy and science for a book project of mine and I found an essay by Timothy Lenoir called The Eye as Mathematician. It is a discussion of the construction of Helmholtz’s theory of vision. The title suggests that the eye is acting like a mathematician. My disposition […] 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 […] 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 […] 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, […] In a recent post, I referred to a study at MIT that suggested that infants reason by mentally simulating possible scenarios in a given configuration (like different colored objects bouncing around in a container). They then figure out which outcome is most likely based on just a few physical principles (like whether the object nearest […] |
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