Friday, 15 July 2022
Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?
That’s not so simple a question as it may seem, because although we are often rightfully warned against people who claim to have “done their research” on some subject or other and to have discovered unbelievable secrets about it, we are also often asked to accept fact checkers as sources of absolute truth, when they’re really not. They’re just ordinary journalists who are being paid to do their jobs as best they know how while dealing with complex, specialized disciplines and concepts with which they are no more familiar than you or I. So in the end, what do fact checkers offer us? Their own subjective accounts of small slices of reality that they think they have understood and that we hope most of them are presenting in a responsible way—in other words, a far cry from what is suggested by the categorical labels of “true” and “false” that all too often litter fact checkers’ articles on complex subjects such as the human brain, or Covid-19. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Monday, 20 June 2022
Rediscovery of the traces of another hominin species from the same time as Lucy
The earliest traces of bipedalism are associated with Australopithecus afarensis, the species of the famous fossil Lucy. But if a study published recently in the journal Nature is accurate, scientists have just authenticated different traces of another bipedal species that lived at exactly the same time. (more…)
Evolution and the Brain | Comments Closed
Monday, 25 April 2022
Our brain: neither hardware nor software, but “liveware”!
This week I’d like to tell you about a book by David Eagleman, entitled Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. This book discusses several subjects related to brain plasticity, which is one of Eagleman’s research areas. In this book, one of Eagleman’s main ideas, which he attempts to conceptualize with the term “livewired”, is that the human brain is a machine that spends its time reconfiguring itself. In contrast, computers are “hardwired” with predefined electronic circuits that run software—computer programs that use this computer hardware to perform mathematical calculations and logic operations. The human mind or human thought has often been erroneously compared to a software program that needs the “hardware” of the human brain to manifest itself. This is a very poor metaphor for many reasons, of which the one cited by Eagleman is not the least. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Monday, 4 April 2022
How to avoid our natural tendency to divide the world between “us” and “them”
This week, I’d like to talk about two articles on the work of Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neurobiologist who published the superb book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst in 2017. In that book, Sapolsky stylishly and eloquently examined the many factors that have influenced our behaviours from the time of our primate ancestors through to the modern societies of today. He focused especially on our identity behaviours—the ones that make us divide the world into “us” and “them” and that so many politicians now exploit to try to capture our votes. (more…)
From Thought to Language | Comments Closed
Tuesday, 15 March 2022
Exercising in childhood appears to have positive effects throughout life
In the northern hemisphere, spring and summer are finally approaching, and I advise everyone who lives here to take advantage of the increased opportunities to get out in nature for their exercise. Because if there’s one thing that’s been very well established scientifically, it’s that physical exercise has positive effects on all of our bodily functions, including the cognitive ones. I’ve posted about this topic here for example in 2017, so today I’ll keep up the tradition and tell you about a recent study by Toru Ishihara and his team at Kobe University in Japan, about how childhood exercise can maintain and promote cognitive function in later life. (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed
